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Faculty Research Areas

The research areas listed in the section give some idea of the ways we think collectively about our research. Prospective graduate students might find these research areas useful as they think about which universities they wish to apply to. They include both the fairly traditional (e.g., “American Literature, pre-1900”) and the innovative (e.g., “Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities”).

The list of research areas is not comprehensive; it is merely suggestive. See the emphasis areas in the Graduate section of this Web site for some other configurations of our many research interests. The discipline of English studies, broadly considered, is ever-changing. Our faculty members are important contributors to that ongoing conversation, and our work changes and evolves as the issues themselves undergo change.

African American Literature and Culture

Faculty members working in African American literature and culture cover the entire range of periods and literatures, including language and linguistics, Black Atlantic and antebellum writers, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement era, and contemporary writers. They work on topics such as sexuality and race, masculinity studies, feminism, and race theory. They have published work on contemporary discourses from film to music to literature to Black English.

In the classroom, this research manifests itself in undergraduate courses in African American literature, cultural studies, and studies of individual authors. At the graduate level, recent courses include “Race and the Global Public Sphere” (fall 2007), “Black Feminist Theory” (fall 2007), “Literary Re-memory: Writing the Slave Experience” (spring 2008), and “Death-Bound Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century” (spring 2007).

Faculty members work formally and informally with the college-level program in African and African American Studies (AAAS). They have been active in coordinating on-campus events such as the 2007 symposium on “Death and Black Subjectivity” and the spring 2007 African-American Film Series. Outreach efforts are led by Geneva Smitherman’s long-running “My Brother’s Keeper Program,” an MSU-student mentoring program for middle school African American males in the Detroit Public Schools, which she co-founded with the late Dr. Clifford Watson in 1990.

Recent publications by faculty in this research area include Geneva Smitherman’s Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans (Routledge, 2006); Jeffrey Wray’s film, The Soul Searchers (2007); and critical articles on artists from D’Angelo to Toni Morrison by Aimé Ellis, Ken Harrow, Lynn Makau, Lloyd Pratt, and Jennifer Williams.

American Literature, pre-1900

The research interests of faculty members working in early American literature, antebellum literature, and late-nineteenth-century American literature are wide-ranging and engaged. Faculty members have published books on topics as different as Puritan historiography, post-revolutionary writers as postcolonial writers, and Henry James’s rhetorical logic. Their current work is taking up questions about visual representation, rhetorical violence, the public sphere, regionalism, and race and identity. Several professors are producing scholarly editions of important nineteenth-century texts. Nearly everyone works in a transatlantic framework. They are aligned in their research interests with faculty members working in early modern studies, transatlantic modernities, and literatures of the Americans (LOTA).

Their research is embedded in undergraduate courses that cover the entire range of the period, from discovery and exploration to the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century. Recent graduate seminars have focused on colonial and revolutionary America, the 1820s, antebellum writers and race, and Henry James. 

Faculty members are active in many other ways. Edward Watts is co-organizing “Prophetstown Revisited: A Summit on Early Native American Studies” (April 3–5, 2008 at Purdue University). Stephen Rachman organized the digital archive “Shaping the Values of Youth: Sunday School Books in Nineteenth-Century America.”

Recent publications by faculty members in this area include Edward Watts’ In This Remote Country: The French Frontier in the American Imagination, 1780-1860 (UNC Press, 2006); Stephen Rachman’s (editor) The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean (Rutgers UP, 2006); and critical articles on the eighteenth-century novel, Henry James, the public sphere, and other topics by Stephen Carl Arch, Lloyd Pratt, and Sheila Teahan.

American Literature, post-1900

A fairly large cluster of faculty members work in this area, and their research engages literature, film, visual culture, cultural studies, popular culture, theory, textual editing, and other subjects. The cluster has specialists in African American, Asian American, Native American, and Chicano/Chicana literatures, and they share a more coordinated interest in questions of gender, race, class, and theory. Many faculty members work formally in interdisciplinary settings, with affiliations in American Studies, Women's Studies, African and African American Studies, Chicano Studies, and the Asian Pacific American Studies Programs. They are also aligned with colleagues in the department working in transatlantic modernities, LOTA, postcolonial literature and theory, the history and theory of narrative, and other research areas.

Their research enlivens undergraduate courses that cover periods, genres, authors, and special topics. Recent graduate seminars include topics like “In Between: Lyric Novels and Long Poems,” “George Santayana and Cultural Criticism,” “Postmodern Literary Theory,” and “Orientalism and Asian American Culture.”

Recent publications by faculty members in this area include Judith Roof’s The Poetics of DNA (UP of Minnesota, 2007) and Patrick O’Donnell’s Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Duke UP, 2000), as well as books and articles on a variety of topics by Aimé Ellis, Gordon Henry, Kathy Jurado, Sheng-mei Ma, Ellen McCallum, Lynn Makau, Scott Michaelsen, Patrick O’Donnell, Judith Roof, James Seaton, Robin Silbergleid, and Jennifer Williams.

British Literature, pre-1800

The faculty members working in the fields of medieval, renaissance, and the long eighteenth century—before the romantic turn—continue a long tradition at Michigan State University of excellence in those fields. Many see themselves now working within the orbit of the “early modern,” a broad conceptualization that brings together scholars working in areas such as medieval medicine, renaissance theories of the economy, and gender and ideology in eighteenth-century England (as well as with scholars of early American literature and culture).

Their research quickens the intellectual life in undergraduate courses that cover the field by period, by author (Shakespeare, Chaucer), and by focused studies of texts in context. Recent graduate seminars include “Material Culture and Literature of Early Modern England” (fall 2007), “A Geneaology of Nothing and the Early English Novel” (spring 2008), and “Early Modern Studies” (spring 2007).

Recent publications by faculty members in this area include Tess Tavormina’s
Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, 2006); Sandra Logan’s Text/Events in Early Modern England: Poetics of History (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing,  2007); and critical articles by Stephen Deng, Scott Juengel, Ellen Pollak, Lister Matheson, and Jyotsna Singh.

British Literature, post-1800

Faculty members working in romanticism, Victorian studies, modernism, and contemporary British literature work on a range of topics, from visual culture to romantic theory to Irish literature to the modernist novel. Many work in a transatlantic framework and align themselves with colleagues working in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and the history and theory of narrative.

Their research appears in undergraduate courses that focus on periods (romanticism, Victorian Studies, etc.), individual authors, genres, and special topics. Recent graduate seminars include “Victorian Liberal Theory and the Novel” (fall 2007) and “Lyric and Modernity” (spring 2008).

Recent publications by faculty members in this area include William Johnsen’s Violence and Modernism: Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf (UP of Florida, 2003) and articles on topics such as nation/state formation, visual culture, and Henry James by Zarena Aslami, A.C. Goodson, Judith Stoddart, and Sheila Teahan.

Creative Writing

As a group, our faculty members in creative writing have authored dozens of books and hundreds of poems, stories, essays, and screenplays. They regularly read from their work at local, regional, national, and international venues, and they often serve as readers for presses, judges for contests, and advisors to literary journals. They mentor the students who annually produce The Red Cedar Review, the longest running undergraduate-managed literary journal in the United States.  Many have themselves served as editors of journals and book series.

The faculty in creative writing oversee a very strong undergraduate degree program that leads to a B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing.  They occasionally teach graduate courses in creative writing, usually under a College of Arts and Letters course number. (The department does not have a graduate-level creative writing program at this time.)

Faculty members work in poetry (Gordon Henry, Robin Silbergleid, Diane Wakoski), fiction (Marcia Aldrich, Gordon Henry, W.S. Penn), screenwriting (Bill Vincent, Jeffrey Wray), and creative non-fiction (Marcia Aldrich, W.S. Penn). Representative publications include Marcia Aldrich’s Girl Rearing (Norton, 1998); Gordon Henry’s The Light People (Oklahoma, 1994); W. S. Penn’s Killing Time with Strangers (Arizona, 2000); and Diane Wakoski’s Emerald Ice: Selected Poems (new edition, Godine/Black Sparrow Press, 2005).

English Education

Currently, the department has two faculty members who work in the field of English Education. Together, they oversee the program and staff the courses required for English majors preparing to become middle and high school English teachers. They are aided in this effort by several faculty members in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Culture (WRAC) whose expertise in literacy, pedagogy, and composition studies complements their expertise in literature and reading theory (Reade Dornan) and language and literacy development (Marilyn Wilson).

Faculty members teach the department’s core courses in English Education (ENG 302, 308, 313, and 415), as well as undergraduate courses in subjects such as “Critical Studies in Language and Pedagogy.”

They are active in numerous associations related to English education and teacher training, including the Michigan Council of Teachers of English, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Bright Ideas Spring Conference on the English Language Arts, and the Carnegie Project (“Teachers for a New Era”).

Recent publications include Marilyn Wilson’s (with Mary R. Harmon) Beyond Grammar: Language, Power, and the Classroom: Refining Contexts for Language Study (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006); Marilyn Wilson’s and Reade Dornan’s (with Lois Rosen) Within and Beyond the Writing Process in the Secondary English Classroom (Allyn and Bacon, 2002); and essays by Reade Dornan on the use of drama in the classroom.

Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities

Faculty members working in this research area foreground feminist approaches to the study of literature and culture. They adopt a broad range of methods and approaches, including critical race feminisms, transnational feminisms, psychoanalysis, masculinity studies, queer theory, Gay and Lesbian studies, feminist theory, and the history of feminist criticism. What they share is, in all cases, an emphasis on the inextricability of questions of gender and sexuality from those of race, social class, ethnicity, and nationality. Their research investigates a wide range of historical periods (from the renaissance to today) and geographic locations (from Africa to England to the Caribbean to the United States).

Research in this area manifests itself in the department in courses on women writers and on feminist theory and elsewhere on campus in courses affiliated with the Center for Gender in a Global Context. Recent graduate courses include “Black Feminist Theory” and “Untimely Mediations: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Temporality.”

Beginning in 2006, many of these faculty members organized a group called FLATWG: Feminist Literature and Theory Working Group. This group organized a series of colloquia in the spring of 2007 and then a major symposium, “Feminist Publics: Mapping Difference, Building Coalitions,” in the fall of 2007. They plan to build upon these successes in 2008 and beyond.

Recent publications from faculty in this area include books and articles by Zarena Aslami, Ken Harrow, Kathy Jurado, Sandra Logan, Lynn Makau, Ellen McCallum, Ellen Pollak, Judith Roof, and Jennifer Williams.

Film and Visual Culture

Faculty members in film and visual culture are interested both in the critical and creative aspects of film and visuality. The critics and scholars have written books that deal with topics like gender in film, modernism and the avant garde, and the construction of national identity through film. On the creative side, faculty members have written, produced, and/or directed several independent films, including Jeff Wray’s award-winning China (2003). There is a core film faculty in the department, responsible for the Film Studies Program; they are joined by a number of colleagues who work in film as an offshoot of their research interests in other areas and by colleagues interested in visual culture in periods that pre-date the emergence of film.

At the undergraduate level, faculty members incorporate their research into courses that lead to a B.A. in English with a concentration in film studies, and these include introduction to film, film theory, film history, film criticism, and special topics courses on individual directors, movements, and themes. At the graduate level, recent seminars include “Postcolonial Cinema” (fall 2007), “The Photographic Image” (spring 2008), and “Techniques of the Spectator: Cinema, Perception, Ideology” (fall 2005).

Faculty members in film studies are very active on campus in coordinating film series and film screenings. In the fall semester, 2007, for example, Jennifer Fay coordinated the film series, “The Right to Hospitality: Migration, Accomodation, Globalization” (with the Department of Philosophy). Ken Harrow hosted the Ghanaian filmmaker Socrate Safo (film screening and classroom visit), and, in the spring of 2008, he will host the Belgian filmmaker Dominique Loreau (film screening and classroom visit). Faculty members are regularly consulted by other departments and colleges on campus to help coordinate their film series.

Recent publications by faculty in this area include Jennifer Fay’s Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Re-education of Postwar Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Justus Nieland’s Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (University of Illinois Press, 2008); and articles and films by Ken Harrow, Karl Schoonover, Judith Roof, Bill Vincent, and Jeff Wray.

Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies

Faculty members working in postcolonial diaspora studies are comparative, interdisciplinary, and internationalist. They emphasize theoretical approaches to the geopolitics of empire, colonial discourse, anticolonial resistance, race and nation, subaltern subjectivities, non-western and diaspora literatures, and globalization. They study and teach literatures from all quarters of the globe—
India, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, and Asia. This is where “world literature” resides in the department: in the faculty’s wide-ranging engagement with the political, legal, theoretical, historical, cultural, and literary legacies of the global forces operating since the European renaissance.

Undergraduate coursework in postcolonial and diaspora studies includes courses on postcolonial literature, postcolonial theory, and studies specific to an area or region. At the graduate level, recent seminars include “Postcolonial Cinema,” “Empire/Colony/Postcolony,” and “Postcolonialism and Postmodernism.”

Recent publications in this research area include Ken Harrow’s Postcolonial African Cinema (Indiana, 2007); Sheng-mei Ma’s East-West Montage (Hawaii, 2007); and books and articles by Zarena Aslami, Salah Hassan, Scott Michaelsen, Jyotsna Singh, and Edward Watts.

Transatlantic Modernities

Faculty members working in transatlantic modernities are thinking broadly about the formation of modern literature and culture since the eighteenth century. Their research does more than shuttle them back and forth across the Atlantic. It engages them in questions that transcend nationalism and that in their urgency have had a formative effect on the concept on modernity itself: questions such as disease (see Stephen Rachman’s co-authored study of John Snow, Cholera, Chloroform and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow [Oxford, 2003], affect and emotion (see Justus Nieland’s Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life [Illinois, 2008]); and fetishism (see Ellen McCallum’s Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism [SUNY, 1998]). Other faculty members working in this area include Stephen Carl Arch, A.C. Goodson, William Johnsen, Scott Juengel, Sheng-mei Ma, Robin Silbergleid, Judith Stoddart, and Sheila Teahan.

Research in this area informs a key sequence of courses in the English major: the ENG 310 sequence, in which students are required to complete two courses that resituate English or British literature in a transatlantic (or even world) context.  We regularly teach Dickens alongside Dickinson and Woolf alongside Cather and have been doing so since we abandoned the idea of national “survey” courses in the 1990s. At the graduate level, recent seminars have included “Modern Critical Theory in a Transatlantic Context,” “Past Tense and Future Perfect: The ‘Text’-ture of Coloniality in Early Modern England,” and “Race in a Global Public Sphere.”


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