People
Department of English
233 Decio Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA
Phone (574) 631-7226
english@nd.edu
Administration
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Department Chair
Laura L. Knoppers’s primary research focus is on Milton’s works and life in religious, political, and cultural context. She has written books on Milton’s oppositional poetry in Restoration England and on Milton’s Eve in relation to courtly representations of marriage and family; her award-winning scholarly edition of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes broke new ground in book history and the history of reading, and she served as editor of the flagship journal Milton Studies from 2009-2018. Knoppers also teaches and writes about transatlantic early modern women writers, especially Margaret Cavendish. She is currently writing a book on luxury, cultural politics, and the court of Charles II and editing the seventeenth-century volume of the Oxford History of Poetry in English. A regularly-invited lecturer in national and international venues, Knoppers has received support for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Folger Shakespeare Institute. Seventeenth-century British literature, Milton, early modern women writers, gender in history, English Revolution, poetry and poetics -
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Laura Betz specializes in Romantic and eighteenth-century British literature, with additional interests in poetry and poetics and textual studies. She has published articles on Romantic poetry in Studies in Romanticism and European Romantic Review. Her teaching includes a range of courses in British literature from the Restoration to the present, the gateway course for the English major, and more general courses in poetry. Recent courses have included “Introduction to Literary Studies,” “British Literary Traditions II,” “Introduction to Poetry,” “Civilization and Its Discontents in British Literature,” and “The Romantic Century?: British Literature 1750-1850.” Research: Romantic Literature, Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Textual Studies Teaching: Romanticism, Long Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Literature, Poetry and Poetics -
Director of Graduate Studies
Susan Cannon Harris is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a fellow of the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish studies; she is also part of the Gender Studies faculty and is concurrent in Film, Television, and Theater. Her main research interest is twentieth and twenty-first century Irish drama, approached from a comparative perspective which incorporates their international context. She has published on W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Conor McPherson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Bertolt Brecht. Her most recent book, Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions, investigated the ways in which modern Irish playwrights mediated between the socialist and feminist/queer revolutions that defined the history modern drama in Europe and North America. Like her research, her teaching is informed by a longstanding interest in theories of embodiment--an area of inquiry which embraces phenomenology, acting theory, performance theory, feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. She has also published a series of articles about theater in eighteenth century Dublin and is currently at work on a project about American theater in the digital age.Harris is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English. 20th & 21st Century Irish Literature, 20th & 21st Century Drama in English, Performance Studies, Gender Studies, LGBTQ+ fiction, theater and theory -
Director of Creative Writing
Dr. Roy Scranton is an essayist, novelist, literary critic, and climate philosopher, best known for his work on war, war literature, and the Anthropocene. He is the author of five books, and has written widely for publications such as the New York Times, Rolling Stone, MIT Technology Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.Dr. Scranton grew up in Oregon, dropped out of college, and spent his early twenties wandering the American West. He served four years in the US Army (2002–2006), including fourteen months in Iraq, then completed his bachelor’s degree and earned a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, before earning a Ph.D. in English at Princeton.His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, and held the inaugural Teaching Lab Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.Dr. Scranton is the founding director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM). Environmental Humanities, Postcolonial Anthropocene Studies, War Literature, The Novel, Literary Journalism and the Essay, 20th-Century American Literature, Experimental Writing
Staff
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Paul Cunningham co-manages Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. He is the recipient of the 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize and the 2015 Sparks Prize Fellowship. He is the author of Fall Garment (Schism Press, 2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism Press, 2020). From the Swedish, he is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). He has also translated two chapbooks by Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias: Selected Poems (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2016) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, 2016). His most recent poetry chapbook is The Inmost (Carrion Bloom Books, 2020). His interests include literary translation in theory and practice, decadent poetics, and ecocritical studies. He is also a coordinator of the International Network of Comparative Humanities (INCH), funded by Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame. Cunningham’s writing has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Denver Quarterly, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Fourth River, Bat City Review, Quarterly West, OmniVerse, Yalobusha Review, DIAGRAM, Spork, LIT: The Journal of The New School, Tarpaulin Sky, and many others. His book reviews have appeared in Transmotion: An Online Journal of Indigenous Studies, Harvard Review, Heavy Feather Review, Kenyon Review, Fanzine, and DIAGRAM. His poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming in the following anthologies: Experimental Writing: A Guidebook and Anthology (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024); A Flame Called Indiana: An Anthology of Contemporary Hoosier Writing (Indiana University Press, 2023); Selections from Gobbet (Schism Press, 2023); Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos (Snuggly Books, 2021); and These Poems Are Not What They Seem: An Anthology of Twin Peaks Poetry (APEP Publications, 2020). With artist Sam Shoemaker, he completed Evidence from Lunar Rocks, a 7×7.la collaboration. In 2018, Sarah E. Brook featured one of his poems in “Viewfinding,” a public sculpture formerly located in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. His short film It Is Announced (a collaboration with Valerie Mejer Caso and photographer Barry Shapiro) premiered in the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Other poem-films have appeared in the MAKE Magazine Lit & Luz Festival, Seattle’s Institute for New Connotative Action (INCA), the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, and the 2021 Prague Microfestival. His short film adaptation of Outgoing Vessel (Udgående Fartøj) premiered in Sophia Kalkau and Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Ung Som Bly, a 2021 art installation featured at Rønnebæksholm in Næstved, Denmark. -
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