English Books
Browse our archive of books published by English program faculty, alumni and current students.
Books by English Program Faculty

Scholars in COVID Times
Edited by Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo.
Scholars in COVID Times documents the new and innovative forms of scholarship, community collaboration, and teaching brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this volume, Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo bring together a diverse range of texts, from research-based studies to self-reflective essays, to reexamine what it means to be a publicly engaged scholar in the era of COVID.
Between social distancing, masking, and remote teaching—along with the devastating physical and emotional tolls on individuals and families—the disruption of COVID-19 in academia has given motivated scholars an opportunity (or necessitated them) to reconsider how they interact with and inspire students, conduct research, and continue collaborative projects. Addressing a broad range of factors, from anti-Asian racism to pedagogies of resilience and escapism, digital pen pals to international performance, the essays are connected by a flexible, creative approach to community engagement as a core aspect of research and teaching. Timely and urgent, but with long-term implications and applications, Scholars in COVID Times offers a heterogeneous vision of scholarly and pedagogical innovation in an era of contestation and crisis.
Published September 2023
Cornell University Press

"K for the Way"
DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies
“K for the Way” explores writing, rhetoric, and literacy from the perspective of the Hip Hop DJ. Todd Craig, a DJ himself, establishes and investigates the function of DJ rhetoric and literacy, illuminating the DJ as a fruitful example for (re)envisioning approaches to writing, research, and analysis in contemporary educational settings. Because it is widely recognized that the DJ was the catalyst for the creation of Hip Hop culture, this book begins a new conversation in which Hip Hop DJs introduce ideas about poetics and language formation through the modes, practices, and techniques they engage in on a daily basis.
Using material from a larger qualitative research study that illustrates the Hip Hop DJ as a twenty-first-century new media reader, writer, and literary critic, Craig blends interviews from prominent and influential DJs in the Hip Hop community with narrative and interdisciplinary scholarship from writing studies, Hip Hop studies, African American studies, urban education, and ethnomusicology. The voices of DJs sit front and center, presenting a revolutionary conversation about writing and communication in the twenty-first century.
Weaving Craig’s life experiences with important discussions of racial literacies, “K for the Way” is a layered and utterly singular exploration of culture, identity, and literacy in America.
Published September 2023
Utah State University Press

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023
A cutting-edge view of the digital humanities at a time of global pandemic, catastrophe, and uncertainty
Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 presents a state-of-the-field vision of digital humanities amid rising social, political, economic, and environmental crises; a global pandemic; and the deepening of austerity regimes in U.S. higher education. This fourth volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series provides a look not just at where DH stands but also where it is going.
Published July 2023
University of Minnesota Press

American Born
An Immigrant's Story, a Daughter's Memoir
An incisive memoir of Rachel M. Brownstein’s seemingly quintessential Jewish mother, a resilient and courageous immigrant in New York.
When she arrived alone in New York in 1924, eighteen-year-old Reisel Thaler resembled the other Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who accompanied her. Yet she already had an American passport tucked in her scant luggage. Reisel had drawn her first breath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905, then was taken back to Galicia (in what is now Poland) by her father before she turned two. She was, as she would boast to the end of her days, “American born.”
Published March 2023
University of Chicago Press

Broken Irelands
Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction
While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity. Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.
Published October 2022
Syracuse University Press

Chingona Rules
Chingona Rules is a handbook for resiliency and a radical love letter to unapologetic bodies that know “healing starts at the wound.” Melissa Castillo Planas proves we don’t have to bleed out in our poems in order to be heard, but if we choose to, we suture the wound and wear the scar proudly. She invites us to dream boundlessly, despite the dystopian society she calls her American home of “fantasias imposibles” and rather than paint a perfect picture, Castillo Planas proudly points to her tattoos, with the smirk of satisfaction, self-acceptance, and ancestral knowledge that declares Chingonas like her “will not be contained.” – Peggy Robles- Alvarado, poet
Published October 2022
Finishing Line Press

The New College Classroom
Also by Christina Katopodis (Ph.D. in English, 2021)
What the latest science of learning tells us about inspiring, effective, and inclusive teaching at the college level.
College instruction is stuck in the past. If a time traveler from a century ago arrived on today’s campuses, they would recognize only too well the listlessness of the lecture hall and the awkward silence of the seminar room. Yet we know how to do better. Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis, two of the world’s foremost innovators in higher education, turn to the latest research and methods to show how teachers at every kind of institution can help students become independent, creative, and active learners.
The New College Classroom helps instructors in all disciplines create an environment that is truly conducive to learning. Davidson and Katopodis translate cutting-edge research in learning science and pedagogy into ready-to-use strategies to incorporate into any course. These empirically driven, classroom-tested techniques of active learning—from the participatory syllabus and ungrading to grab-and-go activities for every day of the term—have achieved impressive results at community colleges and research universities, on campus, online, and in hybrid settings.
Extensive evidence shows that active-learning tools are more effective than conventional methods of instruction. Davidson and Katopodis explain how and why their approach works and provide detailed case studies of educators successfully applying active-learning techniques in their courses every day, ensuring that their students are better prepared for the world after college.
Published August 2022
Harvard University Press

The Winter's Tale
Language & Writing
Through expert guidance on understanding, interpreting, and writing about Shakespeare's language, this book makes The Winter's Tale accessible and exciting for students. It demonstrates that careful attention to Shakespeare's complex dramatic language can clarify the structure and concerns of the play, as well as provide deep and satisfying engagement with the social, political and ethical questions Shakespeare raises. Each chapter features a 'Writing Matters' section designed to connect analysis of Shakespeare's language to students' development of their own writing strategies. The book examines topics in the play such as tragicomic genre; women's assertion of social and political agency; obedience and resistance to rulers; the virtues and risks of following festivity, and disputes over the proper forms of religious devotion.
Published June 2022
Bloomsbury Publishing

Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis
Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies
In this collection, Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies, the contributors offer insights from theoretical, historical, and pedagogical lenses and these critical insights emerge out of their academic, scholarly, and personal experiences of teaching during crises. In some cases, authors have taught while battling COVID, and others have done so while addressing and acknowledging school-based violence. While some teach the analysis of the discourse of crisis, others critique the missteps of policy-making during calamity. More so, some authors examine the finesse of micro-teaching at emotional levels; others find the means to develop macro-structures of programmatic curriculum. Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis highlights the educational decision making that educators have used to cope with the dilemmas that they and their students have faced at the turn of the millennium. Specifically, contributors to this collection offer a broad range of experiences, expertise, and engagement with pedagogy during emergencies that we currently face but also frame issues of emergencies that will inevitably challenge educators in the future.
Co-editors Sara P. Alvarez, Yana Kuchirko, Mark McBeth, Meghmala Tarafdar, and Missy Watson bring varying expertise and knowledge about pedagogy to their editorial efforts on this collection. All are faculty members of the City University of New York, instructing a wide diversity of students at CUNY’s many campuses. In the largest public university in the nation, they have each supported students’ learning through dire national emergency events, such as 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, highly publicized police violence as well as other large-and-small-scale crises.
Published June 2022
Peter Lang

Mina Loy
Apology of Genius
A biography of the flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde Mina Loy.
Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe and, finally, Aspen, Colorado, where she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and modernist.
This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy’s exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the Swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.
Published April 2022
Reaktion Books

Ultramarine
Ultramarine distills four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015–2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface. Through interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne, Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.
Published February 2022
Nightboat Books

Communities of Care
The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction
In Communities of Care, Talia Schaffer explores Victorian fictional representations of care communities, small voluntary groups that coalesce around someone in need. Drawing lessons from Victorian sociality, Schaffer proposes a theory of communal care and a mode of critical reading centered on an ethics of care.
In the Victorian era, medical science offered little hope for cure of illness or disability, and chronic invalidism and lengthy convalescences were common. Small communities might gather around afflicted individuals to minister to their needs and palliate their suffering. Communities of Care examines these groups in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Charlotte Yonge, and studies the relationships that they exemplify. How do carers become part of the community? How do they negotiate status? How do caring emotions develop? And what does it mean to think of care as an activity rather than a feeling? Contrasting the Victorian emphasis on community and social structure with modern individualism and interiority, Schaffer’s sympathetic readings draw us closer to the worldview from which these novels emerged. Schaffer also considers the ways in which these models of carework could inform and improve practice in criticism, in teaching, and in our daily lives.
Through the lens of care, Schaffer discovers a vital form of communal relationship in the Victorian novel. Communities of Care also demonstrates that literary criticism done well is the best care that scholars can give to texts.
Published September 2021
Princeton University Press

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England
Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England brings together theories of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new understandings of the history and design of early modern English drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an international team of distinguished scholars examines a wide range of games—from dicing to bowling to role-playing to videogames—to uncover their fascinating ramifications for the stage in Shakespeare’s era and our own. Foregrounding ludic elements challenges the traditional view of drama as principally mimesis, or imitation, revealing stageplays to be improvisational experiments and participatory explorations into the motive, means, and value of recreation. Delving into both canonical masterpieces and hidden gems, this innovative volume stakes a claim for play as the crucial link between games and early modern theatre, and for the early modern theatre as a critical site for unraveling the continued cultural significance and performative efficacy of gameplay today.
Published May 2021
Amsterdam University Press

Disaffected
Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere
Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire.
After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire.
Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.
Published April 2021
Cornell University Press

Abe
Abraham Lincoln in His Times
David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American life in the decades before the Civil War.
It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country’s contradictions. Lincoln’s lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his father’s side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother’s, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance into politics.
No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds’s masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union, transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, “the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life’s fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.
Published September 2020
Penguin Random House

Walt Whitman's America
A Cultural Biography
In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.
Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery ""b'hoys""; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.
Published January 2020
Vintage

Queer Literacies
Discourses and Discontents
In a documentarian investigation of the major LGBTQ archives in the United States, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents identifies the homophobic discourses that prevailed in the twentieth-century by those discursive forces that also sponsored the literacy acquisition of the nation. Mark McBeth tracks down the evidence of how these sponsors of literacy—families, teachers, librarians, doctors, scientists, and government agents—instituted heteronormative platforms upon which public discourses were constructed. After pinpointing and analyzing how this disparaging rhetoric emerged, McBeth examines how certain LGBTQ advocates took counter-literacy measures to upend and replace those discourses with more Queer-affirming articulations. Having lived contemporaneously while these events occurred, McBeth incorporate narratives of his own lived experience of how these discourses impacted his own reading, writing, and researching capabilities. In this auto-archival research investigation, McBeth argues that throughout the twentieth century, Queer literates revised dominant and oppressive discourses as a means of survival and world-making in their own words. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, literary studies, and communication studies will find this book particularly useful.
Published December 2019
Rowman & Littlefield

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring.
Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies.
This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.
Published November 2019
Routledge

The Difference Aesthetics Makes
On the Humanities "After Man"
In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls “illiberal humanism” instead of around the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing that the liberal humanities contribute to the reproduction of the subjugation that accompanies liberalism's definition of the human, Chuh argues that instead of defending the humanities, as has been widely called for in recent years, we should radically remake them. Chuh proposes that the work of artists and writers like Lan Samantha Chang, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allan deSouza, Monique Truong, and others brings to bear ways of being and knowing that delegitimize liberal humanism in favor of more robust, capacious, and worldly senses of the human and the humanities. Chuh presents the aesthetics of illiberal humanism as vital to the creation of sensibilities and worlds capable of making life and lives flourish.
Published April 2019
Duke University Press

Sensual Excess
Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance
Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production
In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters.
To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.
Published November 2018
NYU Press

No Country
Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization
Can there be a novel of the international working class despite the conditions and constraints of economic globalization? What does it mean to invoke working-class writing as an ethical intervention in an age of comparative advantage and outsourcing?
No Country argues for a rethinking of the genre of working-class literature. Sonali Perera expands our understanding of working-class fiction by considering a range of international texts, identifying textual, political, and historical linkages often overlooked by Eurocentric and postcolonial scholarship. Her readings connect the literary radicalism of the 1930s to the feminist recovery projects of the 1970s, and the anticolonial and postcolonial fiction of the 1960s to today's counterglobalist struggles, building a new portrait of the twentieth century's global economy and the experiences of the working class within it.
Perera considers novels by the Indian anticolonial writer Mulk Raj Anand; the American proletarian writer Tillie Olsen; Sri Lankan Tamil/Black British writer and political journalist Ambalavaner Sivanandan; Indian writer and bonded-labor activist Mahasweta Devi; South African-born Botswanan Bessie Head; and the fiction and poetry published under the collective signature Dabindu, a group of free-trade-zone garment factory workers and feminist activists in contemporary Sri Lanka. Articulating connections across the global North-South divide, Perera creates a new genealogy of working-class writing as world literature and transforms the ideological underpinnings casting literature as cultural practice.
Published May 2018
Columbia University Press

How To Live, What To Do
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens
How to Live, What to Do is an indispensable introduction to and guide through the work of a poet equal in power and sensibility to Shakespeare and Milton. Like them, Stevens shaped a new language, fashioning an instrument adequate to describing a completely changed environment of fact, extending perception through his poems to align what Emerson called our “axis of vision” with the universe as it came to be understood during his lifetime, 1879–1955, a span shared with Albert Einstein. Projecting his own imagination into spacetime as “a priest of the invisible,” persistently cultivating his cosmic consciousness through reading, keeping abreast of the latest discoveries of Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, and others, Stevens pushed the boundaries of language into the exotic territories of relativity and quantum mechanics while at the same time honoring the continuing human need for belief in some larger order. His work records how to live, what to do in this strange new world of experience, seeing what was always seen but never seen before.
Joan Richardson, author of the standard two-volume critical biography of Stevens and coeditor with Frank Kermode of the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose, offers concise, lucid captures of Stevens’s development and achievement. Over the ten years of researching her Stevens biography, Richardson read all that he read, as well as his complete correspondence, journals, and notebooks. She weaves the details drawn from this deep involvement into the background of American cultural history of the period. This fabric is further enlivened by her preparation in philosophy and the sciences, creating in these thirteen panels a contemporary version of a medieval tapestry sequence, with Stevens in the place of the unicorn, as it were, holding our attention and eliciting, as necessary angel, individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet spinning and hissing around its cooling star at 18.5 miles per second.
Published March 2018
Muse Books, Iowa University Press

Archaeology of Babel
The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities
For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India.
Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.
Published December 2017
Stanford University Press

Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives
As there has yet to be any substantial scrutiny of the complex confluences a more sustained dialogue between disability studies and comics studies might suggest, Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives aims through its broad range of approaches and focus points to explore this exciting subject in productive and provocative ways.
Published February 2016
Palgrave Macmillan

Romance's Rival
Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction
Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire--but they might, instead, insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century, while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea.
Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction.
Comprehensive in its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel, Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.
Published February 2016
Oxford University Press

Lincoln's Selected Writings
Lincoln’s Selected Writings includes a rich selection of his public and private letters, speeches, eulogies, proposals, debate transcriptions, addresses (including the First and Second Inaugurals), and more. The texts are accompanied by explanatory annotations, a detailed preface, a note on the texts, and a list of abbreviations.
Lincoln’s writings are followed by contemporary responses to him in poems, songs, and articles; representations of Lincoln in modern imaginative and nonfiction writing; and selections from recent cross-disciplinary studies of Lincoln—including discussions of his literary techniques and oratorical style as well as examinations of his political evolution in new cultural and social contexts. Among the many contributors are Horace Greeley, Jesse Hutchinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karl Marx, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, and Walt Whitman.
“Modern Views” presents sixteen major interpretations of Lincoln’s life, work, and legacy carefully chosen to promote discussion. The contributors are Carl Sandburg, Allen C. Guelzo, James Oakes, Gillian Silverman, Richard N. Current, Harold Holzer, Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, Manisha Sinha, Robert A. Ferguson, Gabor Boritt, James McPherson, Stephen Cushman, Faith Barrett, David S. Reynolds, and Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton.
Published September 2014
W.W. Norton

Sensational Flesh
Race, Power, and Masochism
In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. Sensational Flesh uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts.
Drawing on rich and varied sources—from 19th century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art—Amber Jamilla Musser employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory’s investment in affect and materiality, she proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. Sensational Flesh is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.
Published September 2014
NYU Press

Producing Good Citizens
Literacy Training in Anxious Times
Recent global security threats, economic instability, and political uncertainty have placed great scrutiny on the requirements for U.S. citizenship. The stipulation of literacy has long been one of these criteria. In Producing Good Citizens, Amy J. Wan examines the historic roots of this phenomenon, looking specifically to the period just before World War I, up until the Great Depression. During this time, the United States witnessed a similar anxiety over the influx of immigrants, economic uncertainty, and global political tensions.
Early on, educators bore the brunt of literacy training, while also being charged with producing the right kind of citizens by imparting civic responsibility and a moral code for the workplace and society. Literacy quickly became the credential to gain legal, economic, and cultural status. In her study, Wan defines three distinct pedagogical spaces for literacy training during the 1910s and 1920s: Americanization and citizenship programs sponsored by the federal government, union-sponsored programs, and first year university writing programs. Wan also demonstrates how each literacy program had its own motivation: the federal government desired productive citizens, unions needed educated members to fight for labor reform, and university educators looked to aid social mobility.
Citing numerous literacy theorists, Wan analyzes the correlation of reading and writing skills to larger currents within American society. She shows how early literacy training coincided with the demand for laborers during the rise of mass manufacturing, while also providing an avenue to economic opportunity for immigrants. This fostered a rhetorical link between citizenship, productivity, and patriotism. Wan supplements her analysis with an examination of citizen training books, labor newspapers, factory manuals, policy documents, public deliberations on citizenship and literacy, and other materials from the period to reveal the goal and rationale behind each program.
Wan relates the enduring bond of literacy and citizenship to current times, by demonstrating the use of literacy to mitigate economic inequality, and its lasting value to a productivity-based society. Today, as in the past, educators continue to serve as an integral part of the literacy training and citizen-making process.
Published March 2014
University of Pittsburgh Press

Mightier than the Sword
Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America
“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker
In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.
Published January 2013
W.W. Norton

Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination
Innocence by Association
How the civil rights movement changed the careers of four white American writers as well as the literary establishment
The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliché. Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer's “The White Negro” to Welty's “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” to Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy.
By examining these works closely, Gray posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring but did so in ways that—intentionally or not—often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally naive. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought occurring at the same time.
Published January 2013
University Press of Mississippi

Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance
Winner of the MRDS 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies! Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, Lin reconstructs playgoers' typical ways of thinking and feeling and demonstrates how these culturally-trained habits of mind shaped dramatic narratives and the presentational dynamics of onstage action.
Published September 2012
Palgrave Macmillan

The Stillbirth of Capital
Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India
This book targets one of the humanities' most widely held premises: namely, that the European Enlightenment laid the groundwork for modern imperialism. It argues instead that the Enlightenment's vision of empire calls our own historical and theoretical paradigms into question. While eighteenth-century British India has not received nearly the same attention as nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, it is the place where colonial rule and Enlightenment reason first became entwined. The Stillbirth of Capital makes its case by examining every work about British India written by a major author from 1670 to 1815, a period that coincides not only with the Enlightenment but also with the institution of a global economy.
In contrast to both Marxist and liberal scholars, figures such as Dryden, Defoe, Voltaire, Sterne, Smith, Bentham, Burke, Sheridan, and Scott locate modernity's roots not in the birth of capital but rather in the collusion of sovereign power and monopoly commerce, which used Indian Ocean wealth to finance the unfathomable costs of modern war. Ahmed reveals the pertinence of eighteenth-century writing to our own moment of danger, when the military alliance of hegemonic states and private corporations has become even more far-reaching than it was in centuries past.
Published December 2011
Stanford University Press

Novel Craft
Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Novel Craft explores an intriguing and under-studied aspect of cultural life in Victorian England: domestic handicrafts, the decorative pursuit that predated the Arts and Crafts movement. Talia Schaffer argues that the handicraft movement served as a way to critique the modern mass-produced commodity and the rapidly emerging industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. Her argument is illustrated with the four pivotal novels that form her study's core-Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each features various handicrafts that subtly aim to subvert the socioeconomic changes being wrought by industrialization. Schaffer goes beyond straightforward textual analysis by shaping each chapter around the individual craft at the center of each novel (paper for Cranford, flowers and related arts in The Daisy Chain, rubbish and salvage in Our Mutual Friend, and the contrasting ethos of arts and crafts connoisseurship in Phoebe Junior). The domestic handicraft also allows for self-referential analysis of the text itself; in scenes of craft production (and destruction), the authors articulate the work they hope their own fictions perform. The handicraft also becomes a locus for critiquing contemporary aesthetic trends, with the novels putting forward an alternative vision of making value and understanding art. A work that combines cultural history and literary studies, Novel Craft highlights how attention to the handicraft movement's radically alternative views of materiality, consumption, production, representation, and subjectivity provides a fresh perspective on the major changes that shaped the Victorian novel as a whole.
Published September 2011
Oxford University Press

Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly, The Splendid Edition
When published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a sensation, selling more than 300,000 copies in the United States by the end of the year; it went on to be the nineteenth century's worldwide bestseller. The publisher released a lavishly illustrated gift version for the Christmas season, widely known as the "Splendid Edition," with more than one hundred detailed engravings by Hammatt Billings. The illustrations amplify the book's abolitionist ideas and capture its historical moment, lending the narrative a moving immediacy. The edition was never reissued until now; this facsimile gives general readers the chance to experience Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic in this most revealing form. Reynolds' substantial introduction situates the novel within the world of ideas and images operative at the time.
Published July 2011
Oxford University Press, Splendid Edition, 2011

Beneath the American Renaissance
The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville
The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing. Now back in print, the volume includes a new foreword by historian Sean Wilentz that reveals the book's impact and influence. A magisterial work of criticism and cultural history, Beneath the American Renaissance will fascinate anyone interested in the genesis of America's most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures who defined it.
Published June 2011
Oxford University Press

Mightier than the Sword: and the Battle for America
Uncle Tom's Cabin may be the most influential novel ever written by an American. In a fitting tribute to the 200th anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's birth, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Reynolds reveals her book's impact not only on the abolitionist movement and the American Civil War but also on worldwide events, including the end of serfdom in Russia, down to its influence in the twentieth century. He explores how Stowe's background, as the daughter in a famously intellectual family of preachers, and her religious visions were fundamental to the novel. And he demonstrates why the book was beloved by millions-and won over even some Southerners-while fueling lasting conflicts over the meaning of America. Although vilified over the years as often as praised, it has remained a cultural landmark.
Published June 2011
W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Waking Giant
America in the Age of Jackson
America experienced unprecedented growth and turmoil in the years between 1815 and 1848. It was an age when Andrew Jackson redefined the presidency and James K. Polk expanded the nation's territory. Historian and literary critic David S. Reynolds captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the controversy over slavery, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization. He brings to life the reformers, abolitionists, and temperance advocates who struggled to correct America's worst social ills, and he reveals the shocking phenomena that marked the age: violent mobs, P. T. Barnum's freaks, all-seeing mesmerists, polygamous prophets, and rabble-rousing feminists. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Waking Giant is a brilliant chronicle of America's vibrant and tumultuous rise.
Published September 2009
HarperCollins

Mind's World
Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism
As the mental faculty that mediates between self and world, mind and body, the senses and the intellect, imagination is indispensable for modern models of subjectivity. From René Descartes's Meditations to the aesthetic and philosophical systems of the Romantic period, to think about the subject necessarily means to address the problem of imagination. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hardenberg (Novalis) and Coleridge, and with a sustained return to the origins of the discourse about imagination in Greek antiquity, Alexander Schlutz demonstrates that neither the unity of the subject itself, nor the unity of the philosophical systems that are based on it, can be conceptualized without recourse to imagination. Yet, philosophers like Descartes and Kant must deny imagination any such foundational role because of its dangerous connection to the body, the senses and the unruly passions, which threatens the desired autonomy of the rational subject. The modern subject is simultaneously dependent upon and constructed in opposition to imagination, and the resulting ambivalence about the faculty is one of the fundamental conditions of modern models of subjectivity.
Schlutz's readings of the Romantic poet-philosophers Coleridge and Hardenberg highlight that also their texts are not free of fears about the faculty's disruptive potential and its connection to the body. While imagination is now openly enlisted to produce the aesthetic unity of subjectivity, it still threatens to unravel and destroy a subject that needs to keep the body and its desires at bay in order to secure its rational and moral autonomy. The dark abyss of a self not in control of its thoughts, feelings, and desires is not overcome by the philosophical glorification of the subject's powers of imagination.
Published August 2009
University of Washington Press

Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson
The years of Jacksonian America from 1815-48 were arguably the richest period in American life. Award-winning historian David S. Reynolds illuminates the period's political transformation, casting fresh light on Andrew Jackson, who redefined the presidency, as well as John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk, who expanded the nation's territory and strengthened its position internationally. He captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the slavery controversy, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization; reveals unknown dimensions of the Second Great Awakening with its sects, cults, and self-styled prophets; brings alive the reformers, abolitionists, and prohibitionists, who struggled to correct America's worst social ills; uncovers the political roots of some of America's greatest authors and artists, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allen Poe to Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand; and recreates the shocking phenomena that marked the age, including bloody duels and violent mobs.
Published September 2008
Harper, 2008

John Brown, Abolitionist
The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
An authoritative new examination of John Brown and his deep impact on American history. Bancroft Prize-winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds presents an informative and richly considered new exploration of the paradox of a man steeped in the Bible but more than willing to kill for his abolitionist cause. Reynolds locates Brown within the currents of nineteenth-century life and compares him to modern terrorists, civil-rights activists, and freedom fighters. Ultimately, he finds neither a wild-eyed fanatic nor a Christ-like martyr, but a passionate opponent of racism so dedicated to eradicating slavery that he realized only blood could scour it from the country he loved. By stiffening the backbone of Northerners and showing Southerners there were those who would fight for their cause, he hastened the coming of the Civil War. This is a vivid and startling story of a man and an age on the verge of calamity.
Published April 2005
Penguin Random House

Imagine Otherwise
On Asian Americanist Critique
Imagine Otherwise is an incisive critique of the field of Asian American studies. Recognizing that the rubric "Asian American" elides crucial differences, Kandice Chuh argues for reframing Asian American studies as a study defined not by its subjects and objects, but by its critique. Toward that end, she urges the foregrounding of the constructedness of "Asian American" formations and shows how this understanding of the field provides the basis for continuing to use the term "Asian American" in light of—and in spite of—contemporary critiques about its limitations.
Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist theory, postcolonial studies, and investigations of transnationalism, Imagine Otherwise conceives of Asian American literature and U.S. legal discourse as theoretical texts to be examined for the normative claims about race, gender, and sexuality that they put forth. Reading government and legal documents, novels including Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, John Okada's No-No Boy, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls, and Lois Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, and the short stories "Immigration Blues" by Bienvenido Santos and "High-Heeled Shoes" by Hisaye Yamamoto, Chuh works through Filipino American and Korean American identity formation and Japanese American internment during World War II as she negotiates the complex and sometimes tense differences that constitute 'Asian America' and Asian American studies.
Published April 2003
Duke University Press

The Forgotten Female Aesthetes
Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England
Most critics of aestheticism focus on the Yellow Book, the glossy Victorian journal with the shocking yellow cover that counted among its contributors Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm. But one of the best-known aesthetes, Oscar Wilde, launched his own magazine, the Woman's World. The audience for Wilde's magazine reveals another side of the aesthetic movement that has been largely forgotten.
Every now-canonical male aesthete once competed with what Talia Schaffer calls the female aesthetes, whose critical and popular success made them formidable contemporaries. Not only did these women make significant contributions to the development of feminist ideologies; they pioneered new literary strategies that were incorporated by their canonical successors.
Schaffer analyzes writers who have never been considered together, including Lucas Malet (Mary Harrison), Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Una Ashworth Taylor, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Mary and Jane Findlater, and John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie). These women used aestheticism to forge a compromise between the two models of female identity available to them--the New Woman and the Angel in the House. They developed plots, ideas, and styles that would later be adopted, parodied, or revised by canonical writers such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. They used the "pretty" language of aestheticism as a strategic cover behind which they could attempt radical experiments, many of which prefigure modernist innovations.
Recovering the lost work of the female aesthetes forces us to reconsider the central tenets of late-Victorian literary history.
Published April 2000
University of Virginia Press

Women and British Aestheticism
This collection of essays introduces new scholarship on the women novelists, poets, fiction writers, essayists, lifestyle experts, and critics who played a central and long-forgotten role in the history of aestheticism, the late nineteenth-century movement associated with "art for art's sake." Recovering the work of these women recasts aestheticism as a powerful and widespread cultural movement rather than the product of a few elite men. Aesthetic women were not just mystical models in jewel-toned draperies or passive consumers of blue china; they were remarkably sophisticated writers, such as Marie Corelli, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Jekyll, engaged in challenging their own objectification and formulating new theories of art. These essays show how aestheticism offered both men and women a set of concepts and a vocabulary through which issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, exoticism, nature, the modern, economic productivity, commodity culture, mass culture, and high culture could be addressed.
Published December 1999
University of Virginia Press

Walt Whitman's America
A Cultural Biography
Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award
In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.
Combing through the full range of Whitman’s writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery “b’hoys”; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman’s America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.
Published March 1996
Penguin Random House

Wallace Stevens, A Biography: The Later Years
1923-1955
While Stevens was struggling in his poems to become a "platonic man," a beacon of planetary consciousness, he grew ever more abstracted from a wife who was slavishly dependent on him, and his sullen, rebellious teenage daughter fled the parental home for a marriage the poet angrily vetoed. Nevertheless, Richardson asks us to believe that Stevens, unlike Frost and Williams, was a poet wholly immersed in the demands of everyday life. Her empathetic attempt to humanize him often falters, and she stretches the slender evidence when she claims that this aloof idealist was a "naive socialist" in the 1930s who later espoused "commitment to the left." Despite its flaws, this companion to her acclaimed Wallace Stevens: The Early Years offers a noble, touching, insightful portrait of a writer who wielded imagination as his supreme instrument. Her close reading of his life and work illuminates the ways individual poems arose from his encounters with Freud, Plato, Nietzsche and his essential loneliness in a godless age.
Published January 1988
Beech Tree Books, William Morrow

Wallace Stevens, A Biography: The Early Years
1879-1923
Stevens claimed that he never read other poets, yet, as this massive biography reveals, he held imaginary dialogues with his favorite "man-poets," Hardy and Plato among them. A successful insurance executive and man of letters, he had a precarious sense of self and attempted in his verse to define an ideal self abstracted from his humdrum, bourgeois world. Combining psychobiography and criticism, this first half of a two-volume work argues that Stevens made his wife into a mother figure because he was unable to integrate the feminine into his psyche. The poet comes across as demanding, priggish, miserly, aloof, but the real subject here is the process of his mind, how his arresting images crystallized, and how they amplified or concealed his inner self. Richardson's dense, wordy study rewards the patient reader. No other book gets into the workings of Stevens's imagination so deeply. The author, a professor at City University of New York, has uncovered fascinating material on Stevens's meeting with Dada artist Duchamp and his borrowings from commedia dell'arte.
Published January 1986
Beech Tree Books, William Morrow
Books by English Program Alumni

The Bathysphere Book
Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
By Brad Fox (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
A wide ranging, philosophical, and sensual account of early deep sea exploration and its afterlives, The Bathysphere Book begins with the first ever voyage to the deep ocean in 1930 and expands to explore the adventures and entanglements of its all-too-human participants at a time when the world still felt entirely new.
In the summer of 1930, aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, marine biologist Gloria Hollister sat on a crate, writing furiously in a notebook with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear. The phone line was attached to a steel cable that plunged 3,000 feet into the sea. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world, was Hollister’s colleague William Beebe. He called up to her, describing previously unseen creatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color.
From this momentous first encounter with the unknown depths, The Bathysphere Book widens its scope to explore a transforming and deeply paradoxical America, as the first great skyscrapers rose above New York City and the Great Plains baked to dust. In prose that is magical, atmospheric, and entirely engrossing, Brad Fox dramatizes new visions of our planetary home, delighting in tales of the colorful characters who surrounded, supported, and participated in the dives—from groundbreaking scientists and gallivanting adventurers to eugenicist billionaires.
The Bathysphere Book is a hypnotic assemblage of brief chapters along with over fifty full-color images, records from the original bathysphere logbooks, and the moving story of surreptitious romance between Beebe and Hollister that anchors their exploration. Brad Fox blurs the line between poetry and research, unearthing and rendering a visionary meeting with the unknown.
Published May 2023
Penguin Random House

Language and the Rise of the Algorithm
By Jeffrey M. Binder (Ph.D. in English, 2018)
A wide-ranging history of the algorithm.
Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians well before the computer age: How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? By attending to this question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day.
Here Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole’s nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, erodes the line between technical and everyday language, revealing the urgent stakes underlying this boundary.
The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.
Published November 2022
University of Chicago Press

Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella
By Charlie Markbreiter (Ph.D. candidate in English)
“Hey, Upper East Siders. Gossip Girl here. And I have the biggest news ever.” Every episode starts like this. We’re Upper East Siders; Gossip Girl tells us we are. But also, we aren’t and never will be. All we can do is look inside. Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella follows Gossip Girl, an anonymous blog, and the prep school students she reports on, who snitch on each other for likes. They include: Nate, beautiful transgender himbo, Bernie Madoff’s son; Serena (It Girl); Dan (vengeful alt nerd). Meanwhile, in the year 2030, Gordon (former TV protege) starts writing for Gossip Girl 3: the Reboot. Will he self-sabotage? Or…? Gossip Girl began as a YA book series; it was first published in 2002, one year into America’s War on Terror. Soon adapted for TV, Gossip Girl premiered on the CW network in 2007, swerving through the Financial Crash, and ending in 2012, midway through the Obama years. Interlaced with essays on transsexuality, clones, dissociating, American Apparel, and affect theorist Lauren Berlant, Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella is a parasocial eulogy for the aughts.
Published November 2022
Kenning Editions

Windows at Manch & Other Poems
Poems about legacies, awakenings, love, and offspring.
By Patricia Ondek Laurence (Ph.D. in English, 1989)
Poems about legacies, awakenings, love, and offspring.
Published November 2022
Sharksmouth Press

Victorian Paper Art and Craft
Writers and Their Materials
By Deborah Lutz (Ph.D. in English, 2004)
This book shows how authors in nineteenth-century Britain used the materials of writing (and of reading, drawing, and handicraft) for inspiration and creative composition. In doing so, it reshapes the sensory history of working on and with paper. These activities were many and varied: Charlotte Brontë composed poems and doodled in the margins of school books, George Eliot recorded writing ideas on her blotter, Elizabeth Barrett Browning sewed paper to paper to edit her poems, and Jane Austen employed straight pins to "cut and paste."
Albums provided a playful space to collect and to produce text-and-collage gifts for friends, circumventing print culture for a more intimate book making, as Elizabeth Gaskell and Anna Atkins knew. Notebooks and commonplace books were vital to Eliot, Michael Field, and Emily Brontë as part of a writing process. Writers experimented with crafts and needlework to compose text without paper and ink, most notably in the case of samplers. What writing and drawing happened on—including bibles, sewing patterns, and walls—mattered, as related to, and generative of, the themes of the work. This expansive field of meanings that creativity with textual (and material) things could have was common to the Victorians, but the writers explored here were extravagant even among their self-reflexive contemporaries in their undoing, remaking, miniaturizing, encrypting, reusing, and transforming. The edge of the page, the width of the margin, the covers of the book, were limiting factors, but also provocations to push on further, be radical.
Published October 2022
Oxford University Press

Off the Yoga Mat
By Cheryl Fish (Ph.D. in English, 1997)
With age 40 looming, Nate, Nora, and Lulu find their lives unraveling, their aspirations dashed. Nate, dead broke, in his eighth year of graduate school delves into yoga. Nate's ex-girlfriend Nora finagles a position in Finland where she tries on men like miniskirts and embraces sisu, the Finnish concept of perseverance, in pursuit of motherhood. And yogi Lulu, Nate’s talented teacher, yearns to get to the bottom of her nightmares of childhood abuse as she travels to her hometown, New Orleans, to care for her ailing mother.
Off the Yoga Mat explores jealousy, bends of the body, and the courage to confront traumatic memory. Told in alternating chapters by Nate, Lulu, and Nora, the novel takes the reader on three risky coming-of-middle age journeys through sensuality, emotional evolution, and breathing deep.
Published October 2022
Livingston Press

Hyperphantasia
By Sara Deniz Akant (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
Sara Deniz Akant's Hyperphantasia explodes the sonnet's sonic and imaginative capabilities via infestation dreams, open tabs, and other disruptive forms of longing and (dis)belonging: the epistolary, epic, ballad, or just "some oracle shit" (history). Phanta--our AI BFF, echoing troll, or spiritual center--sweetly sings a "nekromantic soundtrack" into the reader's ear through the "holographic non-place" of dove-robots, sleeping boyfriends, murderous grooms, and empty code. In these broken songs, "the women haunt themselves" through the quotidian trappings of daily routine: unanswered letters, dreamscapes, and ritualized obsessions. And yet, Akant's celebratory second collection refuses to make precious bores of gender, grief, lust, or life. Just like the eponymous hero and prismatic villain of Phanta herself, the trash in these poems not only "sucks our hunger dry" but also "multiplies" in an attempt to reclaim the (often damning) myths that surround the culturally mixed, feminized body.
Published September 2022
Rescue Press

The New College Classroom
Also by Christina Katopodis (Ph.D. in English, 2021)
What the latest science of learning tells us about inspiring, effective, and inclusive teaching at the college level.
College instruction is stuck in the past. If a time traveler from a century ago arrived on today’s campuses, they would recognize only too well the listlessness of the lecture hall and the awkward silence of the seminar room. Yet we know how to do better. Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis, two of the world’s foremost innovators in higher education, turn to the latest research and methods to show how teachers at every kind of institution can help students become independent, creative, and active learners.
The New College Classroom helps instructors in all disciplines create an environment that is truly conducive to learning. Davidson and Katopodis translate cutting-edge research in learning science and pedagogy into ready-to-use strategies to incorporate into any course. These empirically driven, classroom-tested techniques of active learning—from the participatory syllabus and ungrading to grab-and-go activities for every day of the term—have achieved impressive results at community colleges and research universities, on campus, online, and in hybrid settings.
Extensive evidence shows that active-learning tools are more effective than conventional methods of instruction. Davidson and Katopodis explain how and why their approach works and provide detailed case studies of educators successfully applying active-learning techniques in their courses every day, ensuring that their students are better prepared for the world after college.
Published August 2022
Harvard University Press

New Directions in Print Culture Studies
Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture
Edited by Jesse W. Schwartz (Ph.D. in English, 2012)
New Directions in Print Culture Studies features new methods and approaches to cultural and literary history that draw on periodicals, print culture, and material culture, thus revising and rewriting what we think we know about the aesthetic, cultural, and social history of transnational America.
The unifying questions posed and answered in this book are methodological: How can we make material, archival objects meaningful? How can we engage and contest dominant conceptions of aesthetic, historical, and literary periods? How can we present archival material in ways that make it accessible to other scholars and students? What theoretical commitments does a focus on material objects entail?
New Directions in Print Culture Studies brings together leading scholars to address the methodological, historical, and theoretical commitments that emerge from studying how periodicals, books, images, and ideas circulated from the 19th century to the present. Reaching beyond national boundaries, the essays in this book focus on the different materials and archives we can use to rewrite literary history in ways that highlight not a canon of “major” literary works, but instead the networks, dialogues, and tensions that define print cultures in various moments and movements.
Published June 2022
Bloomsbury Publishing

In Common Things
Commerce, Culture, and Ecology in British Romantic Literature
By Matthew Rowney (Ph.D. in English, 2015)
The hardness of stone, the pliancy of wood, the fluidity of palm oil, the crystalline nature of salt, and the vegetable qualities of moss – each describes a way of being in and understanding the world. These substances are both natural objects hailed in Romantic literature and global commodities within a system of extraction and exchange that has driven climate change, representing the paradox of the modern relation to materiality.
In Common Things examines these five common substances – stone, wood, oil, salt, and moss – in the literature of Romantic period authors, excavating their cultural, ecological, and commodity histories. The book argues that the substances and their histories have shaped cultural consciousness, and that Romantic era texts formally encode this shaping. Matthew Rowney draws together processes, beings, and things, both from the Romantic period and from our current ecological moment, to re-invoke a lost heritage of cultural relations with common substances.
Enabling a fresh reading of Romantic literature, In Common Things prompts a reevaluation of the simple, the everyday, and the common, in light of their contributions to our contemporary sense of ourselves and our societies.
Published April 2022
University of Toronto Press

Uncommon Sense
Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste
By Carrie Shanafelt (Ph.D. in English, 2011)
Infamous for authoring two concepts since favored by government powers seeking license for ruthlessness—the utilitarian notion of privileging the greatest happiness for the most people and the panopticon—Jeremy Bentham is not commonly associated with political emancipation. But perhaps he should be. In his private manuscripts, Bentham agonized over the injustice of laws prohibiting sexual nonconformity, questioning state policy that would put someone to death merely for enjoying an uncommon pleasure. He identified sources of hatred for sexual nonconformists in philosophy, law, religion, and literature, arguing that his goal of "the greatest happiness" would be impossible as long as authorities dictate whose pleasures can be tolerated and whose must be forbidden. Ultimately, Bentham came to believe that authorities worked to maximize the suffering of women, colonized and enslaved persons, and sexual nonconformists in order to demoralize disenfranchised people and prevent any challenge to power.
In Uncommon Sense, Shanafelt reads Bentham’s sexual nonconformity papers as an argument for the toleration of aesthetic difference as the foundation for egalitarian liberty, shedding new light on eighteenth-century aesthetics and politics. At odds with the common image of Bentham as a dehumanizing calculator or an eccentric projector, this innovative study shows Bentham at his most intimate, outraged by injustice and desperate for the end of sanctioned, discriminatory violence.
Published January 2022
University of Virginia Press

Form and Foreskin
Medieval Narratives of Circumcision
By A. W. Strouse (Ph.D. in English, 2017)
Why did Saint Augustine ask God to “circumcise [his] lips”? Why does Sir Gawain cut off the Green Knight’s head on the Feast of the Circumcision? Is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath actually—as an early glossator figures her—a foreskin? And why did Ezra Pound claim that he had incubated The Waste Land inside of his uncut member? In this little book, A. W. Strouse excavates a poetics of the foreskin, uncovering how Patristic theologies of circumcision came to structure medieval European literary aesthetics. Following the writings of Saint Paul, “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” become key terms for theorizing language—especially the dichotomies between the mere text and its extended exegesis, between brevity and longwindedness, between wisdom and folly. Form and Foreskin looks to three works: a peculiar story by Saint Augustine about a boy with the long foreskin; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. By examining literary scenes of cutting and stretching, Strouse exposes how Patristic treatments of circumcision queerly govern medieval poetics.
Published April 2021
Fordham University Press

The Economics of Empire
Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter
Edited by Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem (Ph.D. in English, 2012)
A multidisciplinary intervention into postcolonial theory that constructs and theorizes a political economy of empire.
This comprehensive collection traces the financial genealogies associated with the colonial enterprise, the strategies of economic precarity, the pedigrees of capital, and the narratives of exploitation that underlay and determined the course of modern history. One of the first attempts to take this approach in postcolonial studies, the book seeks to sketch the commensal relation—a symbiotic "phoresy"—between capitalism and colonialism, reading them as linked structures that carried and sustained each other through and across the modern era. The scholars represented here are all postcolonial critics working in a range of disciplines, including Political Science, Sociology, History, Peace and Conflict Studies, Legal Studies, and Literary Criticism, exploring the connections between empire and capital, and the historical and political implications of that structural hinge. Each author engages existing postcolonial and poststructuralist theory and criticism while bridging it over to research and analytic lenses less frequently engaged by postcolonial critics. In so doing, they devise novel intersectional and interdisciplinary frameworks through which to produce more greatly nuanced understandings of imperialism, capitalism, and their inextricable relation, "new" postcolonial critiques of empire for the twenty-first century.
This book will be an excellent resource for students and researchers of Postcolonial Studies, Literature, History, Sociology, Economics, Political Science and International Studies, among others.
Published December 2020
Routledge

Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s "Beloved"
The Case for Reparations
By Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem (Ph.D. in English, 2012)
Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: The Case for Reparations is an inspired contribution to the scholarship on one of the most influential American novels and novelists. The author positions this contemporary classic as a meditation on historical justice and re-comprehends it as both a formal tragedy— a generic translation of fiction and tragedy or a “novel-tragedy” (Kliger)—and a novel of objects. Its many things—literary, conceptual, linguistic— are viewed as vessels carrying the (hi)story and the political concerns. From this, a third conclusion is drawn: Fadem argues for a view of Beloved as a case for reparations. That status is founded on two outstanding object lessons: the character of Beloved as embodiment of the subject-object relations defining the slave state and the grammatical object “weather” in the sentence “The rest is…” on the novel’s final page. This intertextual reference places Beloved in a comparative link with Hamlet and Oresteia. Fadem’s research is meticulous in engaging the full spectrum of tragedy theory, much critical theory, and a full swathe of scholarship on the novel. Few critics take up the matter of reparations, still fewer the politics of genre, craft, and form. This scholar posits Morrison’s tragedy as constituting a searing critique of modernity, as composed through meaningful intertextualities and as crafted by profound “thingly” objects (Brown). Altogether, Fadem has divined a fascinating singular treatment of Beloved exploring the connections between form and craft together with critical historical and political implications. The book argues, finally, that this novel’s first concern is justice, and its chief aim to serve as a clarion call for material— and not merely symbolic—reparations.
Published November 2020
Routledge

A and B and Also Nothing
By Chris Campanioni (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
How do we re-write American identity? Start by exploding the canon. Chris Campanioni begins by adapting (re-writing?) Henry James's The American and Gertrude Stein's "Americans" through an amalgam of annotations, observations, aphorisms, and asides, dissolving the boundaries between journal and novel, autobiography and fiction to enact the correspondence between all things when they are copied out. Then he goes further, imagining several other books inside this one, including an exploration of the ways in which "migrant illegality has been fabricated and shaped since September 11, and how these processes parallel the expansion of criminalization in an increasingly securitized and (border-) patrolled United States, and how this might inform a critical evaluation of technology's role in capturing and containing bodies: the specular and surveillant logic deployed for the divestment of human rights—to dispel bodies or, alternatively, to keep them in check."
More than anything else, it is this hypothesized convergence of the real, the not real, and the not yet real that propels A and B and Also Nothing toward a blueprint for American identity built on errancy and errantry, hospitality and mutability, and a reevaluation of the exclusionary practices premised on the fetishization of origin and the original; the singularity of specialization. "Against nothing," Campanioni writes, "if not against expertise and the territorial character of art." In introducing the game and inviting all of us, A and B and Also Nothing is both a call and a response to the avant-garde, an attention to the community of neo-mestizo writers and writers of color who have, consistently, been left out of its genealogy.
Published May 2020
Otis Books

To Remain Nameless
A Novel
By Brad Fox (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
Tess keeps vigil at the bedside of her friend Laura through a long night of labor as Laura’s first child arrives. The two have known each other for what seems like forever. Their humanitarian aid work has taken them from the Balkans, to Egypt, to Istanbul amid the ongoing refugee crisis—an era that includes the US’s war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and many forms of global consequence and aftermath. Brad Fox’s first novel is a luminous inquiry into the incarnations and limits of hope. This writer helps us endure our questions about what forms care may take, what we may offer to anyone, near and far.
Published April 2020
Rescue Press

Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life
By Patricia Laurence (Ph.D. in English, 1989)
Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life reinvents Bowen as a public intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and essayist as well as a writer of fiction. Patricia Laurence counters the popular image of Bowen as a mannered, reserved Anglo-Irish writer and presents her as a bold, independent woman who took risks and made her own rules in life and writing. This biography distinguishes itself from others in the depth of research into the life experiences that fueled Bowen’s writing: her espionage for the British Ministry of Information in neutral Ireland, 1940-1941, and the devoted circle of friends, lovers, intellectuals and writers whom she valued: Isaiah Berlin, William Plomer, Maurice Bowra, Stuart Hampshire, Charles Ritchie, Sean O’Faolain, Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and Eudora Welty, among others. The biography also demonstrates how her feelings of irresolution about national identity and gender roles were dispelled through her writing. Her vivid fiction, often about girls and women, are laced with irony about smooth social surfaces rent by disruptive emotion, the sadness of beleaguered adolescents, the occurrence of cultural dislocation, historical atmosphere, as well as undercurrents of violence in small events, and betrayal and disappointment in romance. Her strong visual imagination—so much a part of the texture of her writing—traces places, scenes, landscapes, and objects that subliminally reveal hidden aspects of her characters. Though her reputation faltered in the 1960s-1970s given her political and social conservatism, now, readers are discovering her passionate and poetic temperament and writing as well as the historical consciousness behind her worldly exterior and writing.
Published December 2019
Springer Link

Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian
By Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem (Ph.D. in English, 2012)
Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian is an innovative contribution to the scholarship on Belfast poet, Medbh McGuckian. This book considers the entire oeuvre of this globally respected Irish woman writer, a member of the contemporary avant-garde with now fifteen (U.S. published) volumes and numerous individual publications. The author positions McGuckian’s oeuvre as political and historical poetry and offers a provocative new assessment of its crafted silences. This work argues that it is the muted character of McGuckian’s poems—a consequence of a defamiliarized language, the overwhelming sway of the image, and a profusion of intertextual quoting—that constitutes their agency and force. The silences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of “disaster” and the limits of articulacy. In line with Rukeyser’s notion of the life of poetry, the life of McGuckian's silences is located, Fadem argues, in the poems’ production, as revealed self-reflexively, and in their prolonged consumption. This oeuvre operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting poetry's reception into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poem and reader and disrupts the given structures of time, place, and the order of things.
Published December 2019
Rowman & Littlefield

Since I Moved In
(new and revised)
By Trace Peterson (Ph.D. in English, 2020)
A new & revised edition of the classic book by pathbreaking poet & cultural critic Trace Peterson. This edition contains a new Introduction by Joy Ladin.
The second edition of Trace Peterson’s Since I Moved In is a welcome re-issue, with a new introduction by Joy Ladin, of a landmark collection of poems by one of the most influential transgender poets writing today. Peterson, enacting her self-chosen name, traces connections and lines of flight between genders, between creative expression and acute observation, between her grounding and training in Tucson’s celebrated poetry scene and her on-going involvement in New York’s. Trace is an imperative, as well as a noun, and a name. It means to write over, as well as a faint remainder. Animated by the space of that double signification, and by the practice of making new life through transcribing an old life into a new register, Trace Peterson’s poetry — in life and in words — gives voice to something raw, inchoate, in-process-of-becoming. —Susan Stryker
Published May 2019
Chax Press

The Internet is for Real
By Chris Campanioni (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
the Internet is for real inverts the autobiography in the age of dis-integration, calling into question all narratives of national belonging.
“Right? So that the universe could eat me & send traces everywhere, this book or the backroom countertop audio of the same scene.”
Sifting through—and re-writing—the films of Godard, the novels of Henry James, Twin Peaks, VR fantasies, Internet ephemera, and his father’s dreams of Cuba, Chris Campanioni reveals the materiality of our spaceless encounters, and forces us to reckon with the violence hidden below the sleek 4G surface. As he revisits his parents’ migration to the United States and his own first-generation dislocation through a blur of poetry, prose, and screen-play, Campanioni shows us that in a culture of self-dissemination and unlimited arrivals, we are all exiles under the sign of a mythical return.
Published May 2019
C&R Press

Drift
By Chris Campanioni (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
A couple arrive at a Mexican resort town as grisly murders escalate, crowds converge in Manhattan for an End of the World party, a journalist’s search for the real story leads him to the facts of his own disappearance. . . Chris Campanioni’s DRIFT is an apocalyptic riddle, a countdown to dead time, where what’s scripted begins to blur with what’s real and the pervasive fear of being surveilled is matched only by a desire to keep filming.
Published March 2018
King Shot Press

Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture
By Deborah Lutz (Ph.D. in English, 2004)
Nineteenth-century Britons treasured objects of daily life that had once belonged to their dead. The love of these keepsakes, which included hair, teeth, and other remains, speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, which is less widely felt today. Deborah Lutz analyzes relic culture as an affirmation that objects held memories and told stories. These practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life - not as memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings. In a consumer culture in full swing by the 1850s, keepsakes of loved ones stood out as non-reproducible, authentic things whose value was purely personal. Through close reading of the works of Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others, this study illuminates the treasuring of objects that had belonged to or touched the dead.
Published July 2017
Cambridge University Press

Death of Art
By Chris Campanioni (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
Death of Art dissects post-capitalist, post-Internet, post-death culture; our ability and affinity to be both disembodied and tethered to technology, allowing us to be in several places at once and nowhere at all.
“The future is trash. Recycling it, re-arranging it. Making it beautiful again.”
“Lately I had been thinking about writing a memoir because everything else I’ve ever written is a memoir while pretending to be something else and I figured it was time I did something else, which was a memoir. So much of my life is predicated on pretending or performance. Language had become another performance for me. One in which I could show off and show myself. At the same time.”
Chris Campanioni starts by cutting out his face in every fashion editorial he’s ever been in. The confession begins. Unless it’s another performance, moving from the Lower East Side in 2015 to the Cannes film festival in 2011, Beverly Hills 90210 and the Day-Glo gaze of the Late Eighties and Early Nineties. The quality of a photograph is called into question in a culture that is oversaturated with them. The desire for image to be replaced by a different, more symbolic charge of the written text and physical utterance is a call to restore faith in art’s sustainability. Death meets birth for its eventual renewal.
In re-evaluating the genre, Campanioni also re-evaluates our cultural capital, as well as our current modes of interaction and intimacy, exploring narcissism through the lens of self-effacement, pop culture, the cult of celebrity, and the value or function of art and (lost and) found art objects.
Published September 2016
C&C Press

The Bronte Cabinet
Three Lives in Nine Objects
By Deborah Lutz (Ph.D. in English, 2004)
In this unique and lovingly detailed biography, Victorian literature scholar Deborah Lutz illuminates the fascinating lives of the Brontës through the things they wore, stitched, and inscribed. Lutz immerses readers in a nuanced re-creation of the sisters’ days while moving us chronologically through their lives. From the miniature books they made as children to the walking sticks they carried on hikes on the moors, each possession opens a window onto the sisters’ world, their beloved fiction, and the Victorian era.
Published April 2016
W.W. Norton

Queer
A Reader for Writers
By Jason Schneiderman (Ph.D. in English, 2013)
Developed for courses in first-year writing, Queer: A Reader for Writers includes an interdisciplinary mix of public, academic, and cultural reading selections. It provides students with the rhetorical knowledge and analytical strategies required to participate effectively in discussions about queer theory and culture. Chapters include numerous pedagogical features and are organized thematically around a range of issues and topics that fall under the queer umbrella.
Queer: A Reader for Writers is part of a series of brief, single-topic readers from Oxford University Press designed for today's college writing courses. Each reader in this series approaches a topic of contemporary conversation from multiple perspectives.
Published January 2016
Oxford University Press

Babette
By Sara Deniz Akant (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
Sara Deniz Akant's Babette, selected by Maggie Nelson for Rescue Press' Black Box Poetry Prize, mixes motor-thrum with incantation, promising to "make no pattern / known again." Perpetually on the move, Babette's populous—from Penny "turned into a toy" to the always absent, always there "gohst in the glare"—are machines of the living, at once spectre, shell, meat, and instrument. Uneasy in their habits, these poems transition between spaces "not made for inhabitants," sifting through manor walls as easily as fog banks. Babette is subversive, menacing, infectious. "There are hazards to Babette."
Published November 2015
Rescue Press

Being Apart
Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature
By LaRose T. Parris (Ph.D. in English, 2008)
In Being Apart, LaRose Parris draws on traditional and radical Western theory to emphasize how nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africana thinkers explored the two principal existential themes of being and freedom prior to existentialism's rise to prominence in postwar European thought. Emphasizing diasporic connections among the works of authors from the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent, Parris argues that writers such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Kamau Brathwaite refute what she has termed the tripartite crux of Western canonical discourse: the erasure of ancient Africa from the narrative of Western civilization, the dehumanization of the African and the creation of the Negro slave, and the denial of chattel slavery's role in the growth of Western capitalism and empire. These writers’ ontological and phenomenological ruminations not only challenge the assigned historical and epistemological marginality of Africana people but also defy current canonical demarcations. Charting the rise of Eurocentrism through a genealogy of eighteenth-century Enlightenment racial science while foregrounding the lived Africana experience of racism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Parris shows that racist ideology is intrinsic to modern Western thought rather than being an ideological aberration.
Published July 2015
University of Virginia Press

Once in a Lifetime
By Chris Campanioni (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
Fifty poems and one day provide the footage for Chris Campanioni's Once in a Lifetime (a film in four acts). But even time gradually dissolves in this coming-of-age drama interlaced with pop music, the age of Internet and status updates, cinema and celebrity, memories of Cuba and Poland, and the passage to the United States. Runtime: 24 hours.
Published December 2014
Berkeley Press

Parades
By Sara Deniz Akant (Ph.D. in English, 2022)
Here is a world of pre-or-post apocalyptic limbo, where past is conflated with present and future; the known is embedded in the dark and unknown. Here is a language of the micro-and-macro, where signs have been fashioned and bent to create a delicate economy of sound, shape, and meaning. As soon as we feel safe in our systems of expressions, we are pushed up and against them, until we can no longer find a difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Contained by seemingly inevitable geometric structures and driven by trance-like meters, hushing rhymes, the poems in Parades congeal to a substance more slippery than traceable: one that is cohesive, yet never static. Both surprising and itself surprised, this work suggests an affiliation with external forces just as it boasts its own internal logics. Here is a world, once again, that taps and harnesses our deeper vacillations: between the celebratory and the tragic, the singular and the plural, the human, the animal, and the machine.
Published October 2014
Omnidawn

Pleasure Bound
Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism
By Deborah Lutz (Ph.D. in English, 2004)
A smart, provocative account of the erotic current running just beneath the surface of a stuffy and stifling Victorian London.
At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day.
As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies—the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes—to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet.
In this stunning exposé of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women’s emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression.
Published February 2011
W.W. Norton

Striking Surface
By Jason Schneiderman (Ph.D. in English, 2013)
"Jason Schneiderman has a fabulous, distillate gift for seeing to the heart of inherited paradigms: the Greeks on violence and the gods; the Christian Middle Ages on violence and conquest; the all-too-transhistorical, multicultural Everywhere on violence toward children. Hence the ravishing paradox of Schneiderman's poems, which find their freshest purchase in twice-told tales: the myths of Hyacinth and Echo, the myth of the progressive totalitarian state, the skepticism of the Rabbis, the nostalgia of the skeptical philosophers. Striking Surface (six of them on the hand alone, says the latest Interrogation Manual) is both beautifully conceived and beautifully written: witty, trenchant, tender, acerbic, and always, immutably, wise." - Linda Gregerson
Published September 2010
Ashland Poetry Press

The Dangerous Lover
Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative
By Deborah Lutz (Ph.D. in English, 2004)
The dangerous lover has haunted our culture for over two hundred years; English, American, and European literature is permeated with his erotic presence. The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero—his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontës, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. Arguing for this character’s central influence not only in literature but also in the history of ideas, this book places the dangerous lover firmly within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the Modernism of Georg Lukács, and Roland Barthes’s theories on love and longing. Working with canonical authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, and also with non-canonical texts such as contemporary romance, The Dangerous Lover combines a lyrical, essayistic style with a depth of inquiry that raises questions about the mysteries of desire, death, and eroticism.
The Dangerous Lover is the first book-length study of this pervasive literary hero; it also challenges the tendency of sophisticated philosophical readings of popular narratives and culture to focus on male-coded genres. In its conjunction of high and low literary forms, this volume explores new historical and cultural framings for female-coded popular narratives.
Published August 2006
Ohio State University Press

Sublimation Point
By Jason Schneiderman (Ph.D. in English, 2013)
“Sublimation Point is like a perfect pop song, making the listener glad to be alive. Jason Schneiderman doesn't strive for complication: he wins us over with rueful plain-speaking. He has Anne Sexton's directness, Max Jacob's eye for incongruity. Tragedy enters the picture, and becomes the frame: nowhere do these poems forget their nemesis, mortality.” - Wayne Koestenbaum
Published December 2004
Four Way Books
Books by English Program Students

The Memory Dictionary
By Madeleine Barnes (Ph.D. candidate in English, Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Baruch College)
Madeleine Barnes is a writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn. Her debut full-length poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was published by Trio House Press in 2020. She is also the author of Women’s Work (Tolsun Books, 2021), Light Experiments (Porkbelly Press, 2019), and The Mark My Body Draws in Light (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her work has been featured in places like The Poetry Society of America: In Their Own Words, Pleiades, PANK, Split Lip Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prelude, The Brooklyn Review, and Plume Poetry: 10. Her poetry was featured in Frontier Poetry’s “Exceptional Poetry From Around The Web” series alongside poetry by Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of fellowships from The Morgan Library & Museum, the PublicsLab at the Graduate Center, and the Center for Book Arts. She serves as editor-at-large at Cordella Press.
Published April 2023
Ethel Press

After Cooling
On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort
By Eric Dean Wilson (Ph.D. candidate in English)
This “ambitious [and] delightful” (The New York Times) work of literary nonfiction interweaves the science and history of the powerful refrigerant (and dangerous greenhouse gas) Freon with a haunting meditation on how to live meaningfully and morally in a rapidly heating world.
In After Cooling, Eric Dean Wilson braids together air-conditioning history, climate science, road trips, and philosophy to tell the story of the birth, life, and afterlife of Freon, the refrigerant that ripped a hole larger than the continental United States in the ozone layer. As he traces the refrigerant’s life span from its invention in the 1920s—when it was hailed as a miracle of scientific progress—to efforts in the 1980s to ban the chemical (and the resulting political backlash), Wilson finds himself on a journey through the American heartland, trailing a man who buys up old tanks of Freon stockpiled in attics and basements to destroy what remains of the chemical before it can do further harm.
Wilson is at heart an essayist, looking far and wide to tease out what particular forces in American culture—in capitalism, in systemic racism, in our values—combined to lead us into the Freon crisis and then out. “Meticulously researched and engagingly written” (Amitav Ghosh), this “knockout debut” (New York Journal of Books) offers a rare glimpse of environmental hope, suggesting that maybe the vast and terrifying problem of global warming is not beyond our grasp to face.
Published July 2022
Simon & Schuster

Women's Work
By Madeleine Barnes (Ph.D. candidate in English)
Fusing original embroidery art, digital collage, and poetry that draws from the Public Domain, Women’s Work is a hybrid poetry chapbook that treads the frontier between the handmade and the digital. Each poem pulls text from sewing instructions and advertisements, layered over the scanned backs of the author’s original embroideries—messy threads that reveal traces of order. Exploring women’s labor, expression, sexuality, disobedience, and gender-based expectations of virtue, this chapbook pays tribute to women’s work and art, illuminating the dangers and adventures inherent to creating as a woman.
Published February 2021
Tolsun Books

Glaring
By Benjamin Krusling (Ph.D. candidate in English)
Glaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.
Published December 2020
Wendy's Subway

You Do Not Have To Be Good
By Madeleine Barnes (Ph.D. candidate in English)
Chosen for the 2019 Trio House Open Reading Selection, You Do Not Have To Be Good utilizes powerful lyricism to illuminate the soul's perseverance to live. Barnes intimately immerses us in what it means to be chronically ill and reflects on the body's connection to the planet. While the body succumbs to illness, Barnes expresses illness that tides silence, "everything / fell apart in my mouth in piles of razors / that severed language, my only tether to Earth." You Do Not Have To Be Good guides us through the ways modern medicine attempts to heal the body, as the poet bravely confides in her reader that she searches for solace in poetry's galaxy.
Published May 2020
Trio House Press
Sex, Heels, and Virginia Woolf
A History of Feminist Polemics
By Paris Shih (Ph.D. candidate in English).
In his third book, Sex, Heels, and Virginia Woolf, Paris Shih revisits seminal debates among feminists and explores the intersection between feminist and queer historiographies. Tracing feminist polemics surrounding major literary figures such as Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, as well as controversial topics including sex, fashion, and the romance novel, Shih discovers the uneven yet intertwined developments of feminist and queer theorization since the 60s. Through such a critical review, Shih not only develops an alternative feminist historiography but also foregrounds its queer potential. As he argues, the ideological contradictions in feminist thinking led to the birth of queer theory. The “troubles” of feminist history, thus, illuminated rather than obscured queer futures.
Published September 2018
The Commercial Press

The Girl Revolution
100 Years of Girl Culture from Flappers to Girl Power
By Paris Shih (Ph.D. candidate in English).
In his follow-up book, The Girl Revolution, Paris Shih uses the concepts of girl culture and generational differences to chart a “prehistory of postfeminism.” As he observes, the history of the cultural phenomenon could be traced to the 20s, when the flapper redefined the idea of girlhood and launched the “girl revolution.” Following the flapper, Helen Gurley Brown created another wave of cultural movement with her runaway bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, reinventing feminine ideals through alternative lifestyles other than marriage and the family. In the 90s, Riot Grrrls, Spice Girls, and daughters of second-wave feminists started the revolution’s third wave through a process of generational disidentification. Rather than undermining feminist politics, Shih contends, the “girl revolution” formed a dialectical relationship with the three waves of feminist movement, at once remapping the history of feminism and anticipating the future of postfeminism.
Published June 2016
Book Republic

The Power of the Badgirl
The Rise of Postfeminism in Popular Cinema
By Paris Shih (Ph.D. candidate in English).
In his debut study, The Power of the Badgirl, Paris Shih traces a history of postfeminist cinema from Sex and the City to Legally Blonde, from Mean Girls to Sorority Row. Spanning three decades and traversing different genres, the book simultaneously builds on and revises previous scholarship on postfeminism. While feminist scholars such as Angela McRobbie critique the limits of the cultural phenomenon, Shih argues for its queer possibility, observing the intertwined developments of postfeminist and queer subjectivities at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the first book ever published on postfeminism in the Sinophone world, The Power of the Badgirl remaps feminist cinematic history and lays the foundation for what would become his trilogy of alternative feminist historiography.
Published March 2015
Book Republic