People
Faculty Publications
Professor James Haile named finalist for PEN Open Book AwardThe department would like to congratulate Professor James Haile, whose new book “The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom” has been named a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. You can find a link to purchase his book here.
Part-Time Faculty Jeffrey Barbieri publishes lyric essay in the Seneca ReviewThe department would like to congratulate PTF & Admin Assistant Jeffrey Barbieri for publishing his lyric essay “Cosmoline” in the Spring 2025 edition of the Seneca Review (Volume 55, Issue 1). The journal is available now for purchase through Submittable.
Congratulations to PhD Candidate Rachel Rothenberg for winning Jabberwock Review Poetry Prize!PhD Candidate Rachel Rothenberg has won the 2025 the Jabberwock Review Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize in Poetry for her poem: “half sister as suburban blight with Viola tricolor and cleft palate.” Rachel has also recently published work in Salt Hill, Crab Creek Review, and Shenandoah.
Read PhD student Leanne Oden’s new blog posts on her experience at the 33rd annual Virginia Woolf Conference!This week PhD student and Woolf scholar Leanne Oden has published four blog posts on the “Blogging Woolf” site that reflect on her trip to last year’s Woolf conference. Her reactions to the conference’s workshops, panels, and keynotes are all recounted. Follow this link to the “Blogging Woolf” site to read her posts.
Professor David Faflik publishes new book on literary gift exchange in early AmericaThe department would like to congratulate Professor David Faflik on the release of the second of two books he is publishing this year, entitled: “The Literary Gift in Early America.” It is available now, through Stanford University Press!
Professor David Faflik publishes new book on Brazilian “futebol”The department would like to congratulate Professor David Faflik on the release of the first of two books he is publishing this year, entitled: “That Futebol Feeling.” It is available now, through Temple University Press!
Professor Sarah Eron Publishes New BookAlong with her colleagues Nicole N. Aljoe and Suvir Kaul, Professor Sarah Eron has published a groundbreaking new collection in Eighteenth-Century Studies. The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life.
Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.
Future Humans in Fiction and FilmEdited by Louisa McKay Demerjian and Karen F. Stein
England: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018This book will appeal to everyone who reads science fiction or thinks about science and its impact on our lives. It raises profound economic, ethical, political, sociological, and psychological questions.
Melville and the Question of Meaningby David Faflik
Routledge, 2018This rich volume of essays restores meaning itself as the focal point of one of our most thoughtful modern writers, Herman Melville. Melville and the Question of Meaning thinks about thinking in Melville.
Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britainby Ryan Trimm
Routledge, 2017Bringing together heritage studies and literary studies, this book examines heritage as a ubiquitous trope in contemporary Britain, a seemingly inescapable figure for relations to the past.
Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanackby Mary Cappello
University of Chicago, 2016This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder.
Understanding Adrienne Richby Jeannette E. Riley
University of South Carolina, 2016Adrienne Rich was an award-winning writer who evolved from traditional to radical. This book assesses the full scope of Rich’s long career from 1957 to her death in 2012 through a chronological exploration of her poetry and prose.
The Mysteries of Parisby Eugene Sue
Translated by Carolyn Betensky and Jonathan Loesberg
Penguin Classics, 2015Eugene Sue’s intricate melodrama unfolds around the story of Rodolphe, a magnetic hero of noble heart and shadowy origins, garnering wild popularity and inspiring successors such as Les Miserables and The Count of Monte Cristo.
- Disappear Here: Violence After Generation X
by Naomi Mandel
Ohio State University Press, 2015Dismissed as apathetic slackers and detached losers, Gen Xers have a striking disregard for the causes and isms that defined their Boomer parents, a characterization that can be traced back to changing experiences and representations of violence in the late 20th century.
Extra Lifeby Derek Nikitas
Polis Books, 2015“Escalating action and suspense will grip readers until the end. A fine first foray into Young Adult lit by veteran thriller-author Nikitas.” —Booklist
Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenmentby Sarah Eron
University of Delaware Press, 2014This book reconsiders theories of poetic authority to argue that the Augustan age created a new form of inspiration, one that crucially contributed to defining the movement of secularization in literature from the Renaissance to Romanticism.