Gerald L. Bruns is the William P. & Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame. His first book, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language, was published by Yale University Press in 1974. He then turned his attention to the history of interpretation and the development of philosophical hermeneutics, an interest that resulted in two books, Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History (Yale, 1982) and Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (Yale, 1992). Along the way he has also written books on Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot. Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory appeared from Northwestern University Press in 1999. Other books include What Are Poets For? An Anthropology of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press, 2012), On Ceasing to be Human (Stanford University Press, 2010), On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2006), and The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics (University of Georgia Press, 2005). His latest book, Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature, was published by University of Alabama Press on April 10, 2018 (the date of his 80th birthday). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and again in 1985. He has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1985-86), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1993-94) and the Stanford Humanities Center (2007-2008). In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He now lives in Winnetka, Illinois.
Noreen Deane-Moran's areas of expertise are: Structure of the Novel; Middle English Literature, especially the Romance; Linguistics, and English for Non-Native Speakers. She has related narrative form and length in Fourteenth-Century English romances, and her interest in the hero and his relation to the structure of the romance has developed into a focus on the technique of Point-of-View in the later Novel. Interest in history of the Language and in linguistics led to the formation, management, and teaching of courses in the oral/aural use of English for graduate students, faculty, and postdoctoral scholars in various departments throughout the university.
The novel: structure and form; Middle English romance; linguistics; English for non-native speakers
Margaret Doody, was the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature and the first Director of the Ph.D. in Literature Program, is interested in literature of many languages and cultures. Her career is rooted in the study of the eighteenth century; she is the author of many articles on writers including Swift, Sterne and Austen, and of book-length studies of Samuel Richardson and of Frances Burney, as well as The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge UP 1985; reissued 2010). Her interests have broadened in pursuit of the Novel in its many developments as a form, and she is attracted to the function and nature of stories, and to the work done through the ages by fantasy. Margaret Doody is best known internationally for The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers UP, 1996), and is a constant participant in international conferences on the ancient novel. Her most recent book, Tropic of Venice (University of Pennsylvania UP, 2006), takes a city as a text. She has received an NEH fellowship (2007) for a project tracing the roots of the Enlightenment in the Renaissance, dealing with thinkers such as Pico and Paracelsus; her book in progress is an enquiry into when and how we began to think positively of change as a good thing. The working title is “Love Change and Chaos: the Coming of the Enlightenment”.
Margaret Doody is also the author of the “Aristotle Detective” series of novels, translated into many languages including French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Greek. The most recent is Mysteries of Eleusis (2006). The latest “Aristotle and the Egyptian Murders” is to come out in Italian in late 2010.
Steve Fallon is Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities. A scholar of early modern literature and intellectual history, he is the author of Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England and Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-representation and Authority. With William Kerrigan and John Rumrich, he edited Modern Library’s Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. A Guggenheim Fellowship is supporting his current book project on parallels in the thought of Milton and Isaac Newton. Fallon is on the editorial boards of the Yale Milton Encyclopedia and of Milton Studies; he is on the advisory board of Papers on Language and Literature, and he has served on the advisory board of PMLA. He has twice been an NEH Fellow. Named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America in 2011, he later served as the Society’s president. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, and at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He co-founded a series of courses on literary and philosophical classics at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, and he is a founding member of the Faculty Steering Committee of the Notre Dame/Holy Cross Moreau College Initiative, which offers AA and BA degree programs at Westville Correctional Facility, where he has taught courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and lyric poetry at the prison.
Milton, Early Modern English Literature, Lyric Poetry
Christopher Fox is professor emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame and former director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which he co-founded with Seamus Deane. At Notre Dame, he has also been elected a fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values. Fox received his PhD from SUNY-Binghamton where he won the Distinguished Dissertation in the Humanities and Fine Arts Prize. Fox came to Notre Dame from Wilkes College in Pennsylvania, where he received the 1984 Carpenter Award for Teacher of the Year. His research interests are in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Literature and Science and Irish Studies. He has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Fox’s interests in Irish Studies grew out of his study of Jonathan Swift and eighteenth-century Ireland. In 1991 he organized an international conference on Jonathan Swift and Irish Studies and later established The IRISH Seminar, which convenes every summer in Notre Dame’s Dublin Keough Naughton Notre Dame Centre and at other international sites, including Paris, Buenos Aires, and Rome. In 1988 he founded the Notre Dame Eighteenth-Century Seminar (SENS) on campus, which still meets. Fox has served on the national board of the American Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies and the editorial boards of various journals, including Eighteenth-Century Thought, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Bullán: A Journal of Irish Studies. Fox has also served as president of the Midwest American Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies, president of the Samuel Johnson Society, and president of the American Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies national Irish Caucus. At Notre Dame, Fox has been the recipient of a Presidential Distinguished Service Award (2003) and served as chair of the Department of English, chair of the Department of Irish Language and Literature, director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, associate dean for faculty and research, and acting dean of the College of Arts and Letters. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newberry Library, and the Folger. Fox received an institutional Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that established a $2.25 million dollar fund for a library acquisitions program in Medieval English, Irish, and Old Norse literatures and permanent faculty fellowships in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. Fox has also directed four National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College and University Teachers, including “Anglo-Irish Identities, 1600-1800” held in the Keough-Naughton Institute in 2009. Fox is the author of Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Britain, published by the University of California Press; and co-editor, with the late Roy Porter and Robert Wokler, of Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, also published by California. Fox has edited Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1987), Teaching Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1990), Gulliver’s Travels: Text and Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (1995), and more recently, The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (2003). With Brenda Tooley, Fox also co-edited Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies of Swift, published by the University of Notre Dame Press. His recent articles include “Getting Gotheridge” in Swift Studies (2005), “Swift and the Rabble Reformation: A Tale of a Tub and the State of the Church in the 1690s” in Jonathan Swift Priest and Satirist, ed. Todd C. Parker (University of Delaware Press, 2009), and “Swift and the Passions of Posterity” published in the Proceedings of the Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift. Most recently, Fox has been Executive Producer of a three-part television documentary for PBS, BBC, and RTÉ on the 1916 Easter Rising. Narrated by Liam Neeson, 1916: The Irish Rebellion has been shown in over sixty countries and won major awards, including the PBS Quality Programming Award, Poland's Silver Sabre Historical Documentary prize, and Irish Television's 2017 award for Best Documentary series of the year. His colleagues and former students recently presented him with a festschrift titled From Enlightenment to Rebellion: Essays in Honor of Christopher Fox, edited by James G. Buickerood and published by the Bucknell University Press. Professor Fox is currently writing a book on Swift.
Stephen Fredman's field is twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry and poetics. His first book, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge University Press, 1983, 1990), examines the theoretical and historical conditions that make contemporary poetry viable. His second study, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1993), maps out the tradition of avant-garde writers in America. His third book, A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 2001), discusses modern American poetry and Jewish identity. His next study, Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art (Stanford University Press, 2010), looks at how poetry and art created new modes of living with the cultural detritus left by World War II. American Poetry as Transactional Art (University of Alabama Press, 2021) looks at poetry’s relationships with its historical time, with spirituality, with the other arts, and with prose. In 2022, he published Pass Through: A Book of Memory Pieces (Dos Madres Press). He is at work on Craving Experience: Poetry and Performance Art in the Wake of John Dewey. He has edited A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Blackwell, 2005)—with chapters outlining the various contexts that inform modern American poetry—and, with Steve McCaffery, the first book to consider Robert Creeley’s career as a whole, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work (University of Iowa Press, 2010). He edited for the University of New Mexico Press How Long Is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin (2014) and Robert Creeley’s Presences: A Text for Marisol, A Critical Edition (2018). His research and teaching interests include modern poetry and poetics; prose poetry; Judaism & Modernism; California culture; poetry and performance art; collage theory; the question of tradition in American poetry; Indic thought and its impact upon American culture; poetry and pragmatism. He has been awarded NEH, ACLS, and Lilly fellowships.
Recent Honors and Awards
Delivered the Tenth Annual Charles Olson Lecture, Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA, October 26, 2019Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, CSC Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2012)Notre Dame Library Acquisitions Grant for purchasing a portion of the Robert Creeley Collection (2011; $125,000)
Stuart Greene served in a number of administrative roles, including the O’Malley Director of the University Writing Program (1997–2004), director and founder of the minor in Education, Schooling, and Society (2002–2012), and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in Arts and Letters (2005–2010). His research has examined the intersections of race, poverty, and achievement in public schools. This work has led to the publication of his co-edited volume, Making Race Visible: Literacy Research for Racial Understanding (Teachers College Press, 2003), for which he won the National Council of Teachers of English Richard A. Meade Award in 2005. He also edited Literacy as a Civil Right (Peter Lang, 2008) and co-edited with Cathy Compton-Lilly, Bedtime Stories and Book Reports: Connecting Parent Involvement and Family Literacy (Teachers College Press, 2011). His current research focuses on literacy, youth empowerment and civic engagement in the context of university/community partnerships.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton specializes in Middle English literature and medieval Latin intellectual history, including religious and political censorship, apocalyptic thought, visionary writing and women’s mysticism. She also publishes on medieval manuscript studies of England and Anglo-Ireland, history of the book and medieval literary theory, especially marginalia, text-image relations, and reading practices before print. A separate area of publication is dance history (seventeenth-century to the present), and contemporary dance criticism; and also Canadian wilderness narratives of the 19th century (currently the unpublished diary of William Archibald Robertson’s early exploration of coastal BC).
Her books include Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (which won the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America in 1994); and Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman, coauthored with Denise Despres (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). In 2006 she published Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (which won the 2007 Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Medieval Academy of America Haskins Gold Medal in 2010). Most recently she co-authored Opening Up Medieval English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches with Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson (Cornell University Press, 2012), which the American Library Association named one of its "Outstanding Academic Titles" for 2013. Her edited collections include Written Work: Langland, Labour and Authorship, ed. with Steven Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe and Gower, ed. with Maidie Hilmo (Victoria: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2001); and The Medieval Reader, a special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, ed. with Maidie Hilmo, vol. 1, Third Series, (2002); and Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. with Linda Olson (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, (English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2009); “Something Fearful”: Dialogues and Essays on the “Religious Turn” in Literary Criticism, ed. with Jonathan Juilfs, a special issue of Religion and Literature, 42.1-2 (2010); and New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. with John Thompson and Sarah Baechle (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).
Her current monograph, The Clerical Proletariat and the Rise of English Literature is for University of Pennsylvania Press, and she is also preparing digital companion to Opening Up Medieval English Manuscripts (for Cornell), and a new Early Middle English companion to both, Between the Lines and Margins: Recovering Multidimensional Reading Practices, with Hannah Zdansky, Marjorie Harrington, Amanda Bohne and Karrie Fuller. She is also co-editing with Katie Bugyis and John Van Engen, Women Intellectuals and Leaders of the Middle Ages (forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer). Her next monograph, supported by the ACLS, is entitled Medieval Interiorities and Modern Readers: Recovering Medieval Reading Practices for Understanding the Self. She is also writing an introduction, with Doreen Kerby, to William Archibald Robertson’s 19th-century diary of BC explorations, and co-editing the text with Andrew Klein.
Recent Honors and Awards
ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Fellowship, 2016-17
NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellowship, 2013, for “Professional Reading Circles, the Clerical Proletariat, and the Rise of English Literature”
Elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (March, 2012)
Medieval Academy of America Charles Homer Haskins Gold Medal in 2010 and 2007 John Ben Snow Prize awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies for Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 2008
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (various awards up to 2004-2005)
Declan Kiberd has joined the English Department and Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies as the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and professor of English. A leading international authority on the literature of Ireland, both in English and Irish, Kiberd has authored scores of articles and many books, including Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism in Irish Literature, Irish Classics, The Irish Writer and the World, Inventing Ireland, and, most recently, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (2009). He has recently co-edited with PJ Mathews Handbook of the Irish Revival 1891-1922, a five-hundred-page anthology of cultural and political writings with commentaries and introductions, published by Abbey Theatre Press in June 2015.
Chronicle of Higher Education article on Kiberd's hiring
William Krier is interested in twentieth-century American narrative, particularly Hollywood film. Having published articles on the fiction of writers from Henry James to John Barth, he has centered his attention on film genres. He is currently working on a book-length study of the version of marital love presented by romance comedies from It Happened One Night to the present. He has received the Sheedy Award and the Kaneb Award for excellence in teaching, and now serves as the Director of the English Department Honors Concentration.
José E. Limón received the lifetime distinguished scholarly achievement award in 2018 from the Western Literature Association and the American Folklore Society’s Américo Paredes Prize for distinguished folklore scholarship. His four books include Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry (University of California Press, 1992), which received an “Honorable Mention” award for the University of Chicago Folklore Prize for a “distinguished contribution to folklore scholarship.” His second book, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) was named as the winner of the 1996 American Ethnological Society Senior Scholar Prize for “a vital and contentious contribution to ethnology.” A third book, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture, appeared with Beacon Press in 1998. His most recent book is Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique (University of Texas Press, 2012). He has also edited the writings of Jovita Gonzalez, Texas historian and folklorist, in two volumes, Caballero: A Historical Novel (Texas A&M University Press, 1995) and Dew on the Thorn (Arte Publico Press, 1997). At present, he is retired in Long Beach, CA. and at work on a book, The Streets of Laredo: Modernity and its Discontents.
John Matthias is Editor at Large of Notre Dame Review. Before his retirement from teaching, Matthias taught courses in modern British and American poetry, poetics, creative writing, and the theory and practice of translation. As a scholar, he worked chiefly in the areas of British and American modernism with a focus on the connection among the arts in the twentieth century. Known internationally for his poetry, he has published fourteen books of poems, most recently New Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2004), Working Progress, Working Title (Salt Publishing, 2002), Kedging (Salt Publishing, 2004) and Trigons (Shearsman Books, 2009). His poems appear regularly in such magazines as Poetry, PN Review, Parnassus, Salmagundi, Verse, Pleiades, The Paris Review, Chicago Review, and many others. His work has been translated into Swedish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Serbo-Croat. His own translations include Contemporary Swedish Poetry (with Goran Printz-Pahlson), The Battle of Kosovo (with Vladeta Vuckovic), and Three-toed Gull: Selected Poems of Jesper Svenbro (with Lars-Hakan Svensson). He has edited 23 Modern British Poets (Swallow, 1971), Introducing David Jones (Faber and Faber, 1980), and David Jones: Man and Poet (The National Poetry Foundation, 1980). A selection of his essays appears under the title Reading Old Friends (SUNY Press, 1992). His work has been the subject of two books: Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias, edited by Robert Archambeau (Swallow Press, 1998), and The Salt Companion to the Poetry of John Matthias, edited by Joe Francis Doerr (Salt Publishing, 2011). His work in progress includes a book of memoirs and essays, Who Was Cousin Alice and Other Questions and The HIJ and Other Poems. He has recently begun to make some of his longer poems into dramatic productions. His long poem about the collaboration between avant-garde composer George Antheil and screen siren Hedy Lamarr has been performed as “Automystifstical Plaice: A Ballet Mecanique Spread-Spectrum Ecstasy, with voices.” The cast included N.D. English faculty Joyelle McSweeney and Stephen Fredman.
In her book The Dispossessed State: Britain, Ireland, and Narratives of Ownership in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Professor Maurer examined literature of the British Isles that narrates Ireland as the site of a unique, culturally specific style of ownership. In that book, she argues that Irish indigenous ownership had attractions even for the British Victorian culture that countenanced Irish colonization.
Professor Maurer’s research covers two areas. The first concerns the influence of Irish writers such as Michael and John Banim, Charles Maturin, and William Allingham on British literature. The second investigates the ways of knowing and feeling that Victorians associated with charitable action, both in works of literature, such as those by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but also in such archival materials as advice books for charitable workers, annual reports of charities, and the rules of newly established Anglican sisterhoods and brotherhoods. Within this strand of her research, she published an entry on "Philanthropy" in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)—a volume that was named an "outstanding reference source list" for adults by the American Library Association.
In Spring 2020, Professor Maurer was co-convenor of the conference "John Ruskin: Prophet of the Anthropocene." That conference, convened at Notre Dame on the weekend of Ruskin's 201st birthday, explored how his legacy continues to challenge the disciplinary divides that separate art from science and ethics from economics; and how his critique of Victorian capitalism and industrialization continues to speak to contemporary concerns.
Professor Maurer received the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, CSC, Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2014. She has also served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English.
William O'Rourke is the author of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (1972), Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles (1993), and On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir (2006), as well as the novels The Meekness of Isaac (1974), Idle Hands (1981), Criminal Tendencies (1987), and Notts (1996). He is the editor of On the Job: Fiction About Work by Contemporary American Writers (1977) and co-editor of Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years (2009). His book, Campaign America ‘96: The View From the Couch, first published in 1997, was reissued in paperback with a new, updated epilogue in 2000. A sequel, Campaign America 2000: The View From the Couch, was published in 2001. Two books appeared in 2012. From Indiana University Press, Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer; and from the Notre Dame Press, a 40th anniversary edition of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, with a new Afterword. He has been awarded two NEAs and a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS grant. He was the first James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. He wrote a weekly political column for the Chicago Sun-Times from 2001 till 2005.
Valerie Sayers arrived at Notre Dame in 1993, was named the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English in 2017, and retired as Professor Emerita in June 2021. She is the author of a collection of stories, The Age of Infidelity (2020), and six novels, including The Powers (2013), which explores baseball, pacifism, and 1941 New York in parallel narratives of prose and photography. Her novels Who Do You Love and Brain Fever were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year,” and a film, "Due East," was based on her novels Due East and How I Got Him Back. All six novels have been reprinted in uniform paperback editions from Northwestern University Press. Sayers’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Commonweal, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Agni, Southern Review, Image, Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. A member of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, her literary honors also include a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes for fiction.
In the English Department, Sayers served as the Director of Creative Writing (1993-96 and 2001-03) and Department Chair (2011-14). She also served as Acting Director of Africana Studies, where she was affiliated faculty, in 2018. She was honored with the Kaneb, Sheedy, and Joyce Awards for Excellence in Teaching.
John Sitter specializes in eighteenth-century literature and contemporary ecological literature and theory, teaches poetry, satire, and fiction from the Renaissance to the present, and team teaches in the undergraduate Minor in Sustainability. He is author of The Poetry of Pope's "Dunciad,” Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Arguments of Augustan Wit, and The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, which was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2011 by Choice magazine. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry and two volumes of The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Other recent work includes a chapter on poetry from 1740 to 1790 for the revised Cambridge History of English Literature, a chapter on the "poetry of melancholy" for the Blackwell Companion to British Literature, and articles on Samuel Johnson, climate change, and academic responsibility. He received the 2014 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award given by the College of Arts & Letters.
Steve Tomasula is author of the novels Ascension (The University of Alabama Press); VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press); The Book of Portraiture (University of Alabama Press/FC2); IN & OZ (University of Chicago Press); and TOC: A New-Media Novel (University of Alabama Press/FC2 and App for iPad). Over fifty of his short stories have been in magazines like Bomb, McSweeneys, and The Iowa Review. He is the editor of Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art (The University of Alabama Press). A number are collected in Once Human: Stories. Critical essays on art and literature have been published internationally in journals including Leonardo, Kunstforum (Germany), and Circa (Ireland), while his essays and fiction have been included in anthologies such as Musing the Mosaic (SUNY); Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge); Forms at War (University of Alabama Press); Not Normal, Illinois (Indiana University Press); and The Year’s Best SF (NY: Harper Collins). He has given featured readings or keynote addresses at the Universite Paris Sorbonne; The Bowery Poetry Club; KGB, Shakespeare & Company; The Library of Congress; The University of California San Diego; Brown University, and other venues. Incorporating narrative forms of all kinds—from comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reports—Tomasula’s writing has been called a ‘reinvention of the novel,’ crossing visual, as well as written genres, and drawing from science and the arts to take up themes of representation, especially how people picture each other through the languages they use.
Chris R. Vanden Bossche specializes in Victorian fiction and non-fiction prose. He has recently published a study of Victorian conceptions of how to produce social change entitled Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832-1867 (Johns Hopkins University Press). His essays have dealt with family and class as represented in cookery books and David Copperfield, separate spheres and social reform in Ruskin, the idea of authorship in the copyright debates of 1837-1842, and "coming of age" in Victorian literature and culture. In addition, he has published essays on Tennyson, Scott, and other nineteenth-century subjects. He is also the author of a study of the intersections of political and literary authority, Carlyle and the Search for Authority, and editor of Thomas Carlyle's Historical Essays and Past and Present.
Laura Dassow Walls is the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2017, in time to honor Thoreau’s 200th birthday. This book, the first full-length, comprehensive biography of Thoreau in a generation, draws on extensive new research and the full range of Thoreau’s published and unpublished writings to present Thoreau as vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions—fully embedded in his place and time, yet speaking powerfully to the problems and perils of today.
Professor Walls works in the field of literature and science, with a special concentration on Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on American Transcendentalism more generally. Her quest to understand 19th-century American literature in its broad political, historical, and philosophical contexts has led to a continuing interest in British and German writers, philosophers, and scientists as well, particularly the German natural scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Her book The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago 2009) traces the Humboldt network from Germany to the Americas in science, politics, literature, and the arts; it earned the Merle Curti Award for intellectual history by the Organization of American Historians, the James Russell Lowell Prize for literary studies by the Modern Language Association, and the Kendrick Prize for literature and science by SLSA, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Her earlier books include Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Wisconsin 1995), Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Cornell 2003), and a volume co-edited with Joel Myerson and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism (2010). She looks forward to exploring American Transcendentalism more broadly as an intellectual, social, and environmental reform movement, and she is now working on a literary biography of the American writer Barry Lopez, who in profound ways has brought the concerns of the Transcendentalists into the turbulent worlds of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, the Center for Humans and Nature, and the William P. and Hazel B. White Foundation.
Henry Weinfield is a poet, translator, and literary scholar. His most recent collections of poetry are A Wandering Aramaean: Passover Poems and Translations (Dos Madres 2012) and Without Mythologies: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Dos Madres 2008). His most recent study is The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge 2012). His verse-translations include a version, with commentary, of the Collected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (University of California Press 1995) and (with Catherine Schlegel of Notre Dame’s Classics Department) a translation of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days (University of Michigan Press 2006). He is also the author of The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk (University of Iowa Press 2009), The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History (Southern Illinois University Press 1991), and many poems, essays, and articles. He is currently working on a new collection of poems and on a translation of the sonnets of the sixteenth-century French poet, Pierre de Ronsard.
Specialty: Twentieth-century American literature, language theory
Gerald L. Bruns is the William P. & Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame. His first book, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language, was published by Yale University Press in 1974. He then turned his attention to the history of interpretation and the development of philosophical hermeneutics, an interest that resulted in two books, Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History (Yale, 1982) and Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (Yale, 1992). Along the way he has also written books on Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot. Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory appeared from Northwestern University Press in 1999. Other books include What Are Poets For? An Anthropology of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press, 2012), On Ceasing to be Human (Stanford University Press, 2010), On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2006), and The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics (University of Georgia Press, 2005). His latest book, Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature, was published by University of Alabama Press on April 10, 2018 (the date of his 80th birthday). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and again in 1985. He has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1985-86), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1993-94) and the Stanford Humanities Center (2007-2008). In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He now lives in Winnetka, Illinois.
Noreen Deane-Moran's areas of expertise are: Structure of the Novel; Middle English Literature, especially the Romance; Linguistics, and English for Non-Native Speakers. She has related narrative form and length in Fourteenth-Century English romances, and her interest in the hero and his relation to the structure of the romance has developed into a focus on the technique of Point-of-View in the later Novel. Interest in history of the Language and in linguistics led to the formation, management, and teaching of courses in the oral/aural use of English for graduate students, faculty, and postdoctoral scholars in various departments throughout the university. The novel: structure and form; Middle English romance; linguistics; English for non-native speakers
Margaret Doody, was the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature and the first Director of the Ph.D. in Literature Program, is interested in literature of many languages and cultures. Her career is rooted in the study of the eighteenth century; she is the author of many articles on writers including Swift, Sterne and Austen, and of book-length studies of Samuel Richardson and of Frances Burney, as well as The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge UP 1985; reissued 2010). Her interests have broadened in pursuit of the Novel in its many developments as a form, and she is attracted to the function and nature of stories, and to the work done through the ages by fantasy. Margaret Doody is best known internationally for The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers UP, 1996), and is a constant participant in international conferences on the ancient novel. Her most recent book, Tropic of Venice (University of Pennsylvania UP, 2006), takes a city as a text. She has received an NEH fellowship (2007) for a project tracing the roots of the Enlightenment in the Renaissance, dealing with thinkers such as Pico and Paracelsus; her book in progress is an enquiry into when and how we began to think positively of change as a good thing. The working title is “Love Change and Chaos: the Coming of the Enlightenment”. Margaret Doody is also the author of the “Aristotle Detective” series of novels, translated into many languages including French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Greek. The most recent is Mysteries of Eleusis (2006). The latest “Aristotle and the Egyptian Murders” is to come out in Italian in late 2010.
Steve Fallon is Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities. A scholar of early modern literature and intellectual history, he is the author of Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England and Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-representation and Authority. With William Kerrigan and John Rumrich, he edited Modern Library’s Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. A Guggenheim Fellowship is supporting his current book project on parallels in the thought of Milton and Isaac Newton. Fallon is on the editorial boards of the Yale Milton Encyclopedia and of Milton Studies; he is on the advisory board of Papers on Language and Literature, and he has served on the advisory board of PMLA. He has twice been an NEH Fellow. Named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America in 2011, he later served as the Society’s president. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, and at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He co-founded a series of courses on literary and philosophical classics at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, and he is a founding member of the Faculty Steering Committee of the Notre Dame/Holy Cross Moreau College Initiative, which offers AA and BA degree programs at Westville Correctional Facility, where he has taught courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and lyric poetry at the prison. Milton, Early Modern English Literature, Lyric Poetry
Christopher Fox is professor emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame and former director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, which he co-founded with Seamus Deane. At Notre Dame, he has also been elected a fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values. Fox received his PhD from SUNY-Binghamton where he won the Distinguished Dissertation in the Humanities and Fine Arts Prize. Fox came to Notre Dame from Wilkes College in Pennsylvania, where he received the 1984 Carpenter Award for Teacher of the Year. His research interests are in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Literature and Science and Irish Studies. He has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Fox’s interests in Irish Studies grew out of his study of Jonathan Swift and eighteenth-century Ireland. In 1991 he organized an international conference on Jonathan Swift and Irish Studies and later established The IRISH Seminar, which convenes every summer in Notre Dame’s Dublin Keough Naughton Notre Dame Centre and at other international sites, including Paris, Buenos Aires, and Rome. In 1988 he founded the Notre Dame Eighteenth-Century Seminar (SENS) on campus, which still meets. Fox has served on the national board of the American Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies and the editorial boards of various journals, including Eighteenth-Century Thought, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Bullán: A Journal of Irish Studies. Fox has also served as president of the Midwest American Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies, president of the Samuel Johnson Society, and president of the American Society For Eighteenth-Century Studies national Irish Caucus. At Notre Dame, Fox has been the recipient of a Presidential Distinguished Service Award (2003) and served as chair of the Department of English, chair of the Department of Irish Language and Literature, director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, associate dean for faculty and research, and acting dean of the College of Arts and Letters. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Newberry Library, and the Folger. Fox received an institutional Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that established a $2.25 million dollar fund for a library acquisitions program in Medieval English, Irish, and Old Norse literatures and permanent faculty fellowships in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. Fox has also directed four National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College and University Teachers, including “Anglo-Irish Identities, 1600-1800” held in the Keough-Naughton Institute in 2009. Fox is the author of Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Britain, published by the University of California Press; and co-editor, with the late Roy Porter and Robert Wokler, of Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, also published by California. Fox has edited Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1987), Teaching Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1990), Gulliver’s Travels: Text and Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (1995), and more recently, The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (2003). With Brenda Tooley, Fox also co-edited Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies of Swift, published by the University of Notre Dame Press. His recent articles include “Getting Gotheridge” in Swift Studies (2005), “Swift and the Rabble Reformation: A Tale of a Tub and the State of the Church in the 1690s” in Jonathan Swift Priest and Satirist, ed. Todd C. Parker (University of Delaware Press, 2009), and “Swift and the Passions of Posterity” published in the Proceedings of the Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift. Most recently, Fox has been Executive Producer of a three-part television documentary for PBS, BBC, and RTÉ on the 1916 Easter Rising. Narrated by Liam Neeson, 1916: The Irish Rebellion has been shown in over sixty countries and won major awards, including the PBS Quality Programming Award, Poland's Silver Sabre Historical Documentary prize, and Irish Television's 2017 award for Best Documentary series of the year. His colleagues and former students recently presented him with a festschrift titled From Enlightenment to Rebellion: Essays in Honor of Christopher Fox, edited by James G. Buickerood and published by the Bucknell University Press. Professor Fox is currently writing a book on Swift.
Stephen Fredman's field is twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry and poetics. His first book, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge University Press, 1983, 1990), examines the theoretical and historical conditions that make contemporary poetry viable. His second study, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1993), maps out the tradition of avant-garde writers in America. His third book, A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 2001), discusses modern American poetry and Jewish identity. His next study, Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art (Stanford University Press, 2010), looks at how poetry and art created new modes of living with the cultural detritus left by World War II. American Poetry as Transactional Art (University of Alabama Press, 2021) looks at poetry’s relationships with its historical time, with spirituality, with the other arts, and with prose. In 2022, he published Pass Through: A Book of Memory Pieces (Dos Madres Press). He is at work on Craving Experience: Poetry and Performance Art in the Wake of John Dewey. He has edited A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Blackwell, 2005)—with chapters outlining the various contexts that inform modern American poetry—and, with Steve McCaffery, the first book to consider Robert Creeley’s career as a whole, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work (University of Iowa Press, 2010). He edited for the University of New Mexico Press How Long Is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin (2014) and Robert Creeley’s Presences: A Text for Marisol, A Critical Edition (2018). His research and teaching interests include modern poetry and poetics; prose poetry; Judaism & Modernism; California culture; poetry and performance art; collage theory; the question of tradition in American poetry; Indic thought and its impact upon American culture; poetry and pragmatism. He has been awarded NEH, ACLS, and Lilly fellowships. Recent Honors and Awards Delivered the Tenth Annual Charles Olson Lecture, Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA, October 26, 2019Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, CSC Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2012)Notre Dame Library Acquisitions Grant for purchasing a portion of the Robert Creeley Collection (2011; $125,000)
Stuart Greene served in a number of administrative roles, including the O’Malley Director of the University Writing Program (1997–2004), director and founder of the minor in Education, Schooling, and Society (2002–2012), and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in Arts and Letters (2005–2010). His research has examined the intersections of race, poverty, and achievement in public schools. This work has led to the publication of his co-edited volume, Making Race Visible: Literacy Research for Racial Understanding (Teachers College Press, 2003), for which he won the National Council of Teachers of English Richard A. Meade Award in 2005. He also edited Literacy as a Civil Right (Peter Lang, 2008) and co-edited with Cathy Compton-Lilly, Bedtime Stories and Book Reports: Connecting Parent Involvement and Family Literacy (Teachers College Press, 2011). His current research focuses on literacy, youth empowerment and civic engagement in the context of university/community partnerships.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton specializes in Middle English literature and medieval Latin intellectual history, including religious and political censorship, apocalyptic thought, visionary writing and women’s mysticism. She also publishes on medieval manuscript studies of England and Anglo-Ireland, history of the book and medieval literary theory, especially marginalia, text-image relations, and reading practices before print. A separate area of publication is dance history (seventeenth-century to the present), and contemporary dance criticism; and also Canadian wilderness narratives of the 19th century (currently the unpublished diary of William Archibald Robertson’s early exploration of coastal BC). Her books include Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (which won the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America in 1994); and Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman, coauthored with Denise Despres (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). In 2006 she published Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (which won the 2007 Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Medieval Academy of America Haskins Gold Medal in 2010). Most recently she co-authored Opening Up Medieval English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches with Maidie Hilmo and Linda Olson (Cornell University Press, 2012), which the American Library Association named one of its "Outstanding Academic Titles" for 2013. Her edited collections include Written Work: Langland, Labour and Authorship, ed. with Steven Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe and Gower, ed. with Maidie Hilmo (Victoria: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2001); and The Medieval Reader, a special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, ed. with Maidie Hilmo, vol. 1, Third Series, (2002); and Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. with Linda Olson (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, (English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2009); “Something Fearful”: Dialogues and Essays on the “Religious Turn” in Literary Criticism, ed. with Jonathan Juilfs, a special issue of Religion and Literature, 42.1-2 (2010); and New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. with John Thompson and Sarah Baechle (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). Her current monograph, The Clerical Proletariat and the Rise of English Literature is for University of Pennsylvania Press, and she is also preparing digital companion to Opening Up Medieval English Manuscripts (for Cornell), and a new Early Middle English companion to both, Between the Lines and Margins: Recovering Multidimensional Reading Practices, with Hannah Zdansky, Marjorie Harrington, Amanda Bohne and Karrie Fuller. She is also co-editing with Katie Bugyis and John Van Engen, Women Intellectuals and Leaders of the Middle Ages (forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer). Her next monograph, supported by the ACLS, is entitled Medieval Interiorities and Modern Readers: Recovering Medieval Reading Practices for Understanding the Self. She is also writing an introduction, with Doreen Kerby, to William Archibald Robertson’s 19th-century diary of BC explorations, and co-editing the text with Andrew Klein. Recent Honors and Awards ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Fellowship, 2016-17 NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellowship, 2013, for “Professional Reading Circles, the Clerical Proletariat, and the Rise of English Literature” Elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (March, 2012) Medieval Academy of America Charles Homer Haskins Gold Medal in 2010 and 2007 John Ben Snow Prize awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies for Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 2008 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (various awards up to 2004-2005)
Declan Kiberd has joined the English Department and Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies as the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and professor of English. A leading international authority on the literature of Ireland, both in English and Irish, Kiberd has authored scores of articles and many books, including Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism in Irish Literature, Irish Classics, The Irish Writer and the World, Inventing Ireland, and, most recently, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (2009). He has recently co-edited with PJ Mathews Handbook of the Irish Revival 1891-1922, a five-hundred-page anthology of cultural and political writings with commentaries and introductions, published by Abbey Theatre Press in June 2015. Chronicle of Higher Education article on Kiberd's hiring
William Krier is interested in twentieth-century American narrative, particularly Hollywood film. Having published articles on the fiction of writers from Henry James to John Barth, he has centered his attention on film genres. He is currently working on a book-length study of the version of marital love presented by romance comedies from It Happened One Night to the present. He has received the Sheedy Award and the Kaneb Award for excellence in teaching, and now serves as the Director of the English Department Honors Concentration.
José E. Limón received the lifetime distinguished scholarly achievement award in 2018 from the Western Literature Association and the American Folklore Society’s Américo Paredes Prize for distinguished folklore scholarship. His four books include Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry (University of California Press, 1992), which received an “Honorable Mention” award for the University of Chicago Folklore Prize for a “distinguished contribution to folklore scholarship.” His second book, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) was named as the winner of the 1996 American Ethnological Society Senior Scholar Prize for “a vital and contentious contribution to ethnology.” A third book, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture, appeared with Beacon Press in 1998. His most recent book is Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique (University of Texas Press, 2012). He has also edited the writings of Jovita Gonzalez, Texas historian and folklorist, in two volumes, Caballero: A Historical Novel (Texas A&M University Press, 1995) and Dew on the Thorn (Arte Publico Press, 1997). At present, he is retired in Long Beach, CA. and at work on a book, The Streets of Laredo: Modernity and its Discontents.
John Matthias is Editor at Large of Notre Dame Review. Before his retirement from teaching, Matthias taught courses in modern British and American poetry, poetics, creative writing, and the theory and practice of translation. As a scholar, he worked chiefly in the areas of British and American modernism with a focus on the connection among the arts in the twentieth century. Known internationally for his poetry, he has published fourteen books of poems, most recently New Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2004), Working Progress, Working Title (Salt Publishing, 2002), Kedging (Salt Publishing, 2004) and Trigons (Shearsman Books, 2009). His poems appear regularly in such magazines as Poetry, PN Review, Parnassus, Salmagundi, Verse, Pleiades, The Paris Review, Chicago Review, and many others. His work has been translated into Swedish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Serbo-Croat. His own translations include Contemporary Swedish Poetry (with Goran Printz-Pahlson), The Battle of Kosovo (with Vladeta Vuckovic), and Three-toed Gull: Selected Poems of Jesper Svenbro (with Lars-Hakan Svensson). He has edited 23 Modern British Poets (Swallow, 1971), Introducing David Jones (Faber and Faber, 1980), and David Jones: Man and Poet (The National Poetry Foundation, 1980). A selection of his essays appears under the title Reading Old Friends (SUNY Press, 1992). His work has been the subject of two books: Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias, edited by Robert Archambeau (Swallow Press, 1998), and The Salt Companion to the Poetry of John Matthias, edited by Joe Francis Doerr (Salt Publishing, 2011). His work in progress includes a book of memoirs and essays, Who Was Cousin Alice and Other Questions and The HIJ and Other Poems. He has recently begun to make some of his longer poems into dramatic productions. His long poem about the collaboration between avant-garde composer George Antheil and screen siren Hedy Lamarr has been performed as “Automystifstical Plaice: A Ballet Mecanique Spread-Spectrum Ecstasy, with voices.” The cast included N.D. English faculty Joyelle McSweeney and Stephen Fredman.
In her book The Dispossessed State: Britain, Ireland, and Narratives of Ownership in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Professor Maurer examined literature of the British Isles that narrates Ireland as the site of a unique, culturally specific style of ownership. In that book, she argues that Irish indigenous ownership had attractions even for the British Victorian culture that countenanced Irish colonization. Professor Maurer’s research covers two areas. The first concerns the influence of Irish writers such as Michael and John Banim, Charles Maturin, and William Allingham on British literature. The second investigates the ways of knowing and feeling that Victorians associated with charitable action, both in works of literature, such as those by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but also in such archival materials as advice books for charitable workers, annual reports of charities, and the rules of newly established Anglican sisterhoods and brotherhoods. Within this strand of her research, she published an entry on "Philanthropy" in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)—a volume that was named an "outstanding reference source list" for adults by the American Library Association. In Spring 2020, Professor Maurer was co-convenor of the conference "John Ruskin: Prophet of the Anthropocene." That conference, convened at Notre Dame on the weekend of Ruskin's 201st birthday, explored how his legacy continues to challenge the disciplinary divides that separate art from science and ethics from economics; and how his critique of Victorian capitalism and industrialization continues to speak to contemporary concerns. Professor Maurer received the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, CSC, Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2014. She has also served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English.
William O'Rourke is the author of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (1972), Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles (1993), and On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir (2006), as well as the novels The Meekness of Isaac (1974), Idle Hands (1981), Criminal Tendencies (1987), and Notts (1996). He is the editor of On the Job: Fiction About Work by Contemporary American Writers (1977) and co-editor of Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years (2009). His book, Campaign America ‘96: The View From the Couch, first published in 1997, was reissued in paperback with a new, updated epilogue in 2000. A sequel, Campaign America 2000: The View From the Couch, was published in 2001. Two books appeared in 2012. From Indiana University Press, Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer; and from the Notre Dame Press, a 40th anniversary edition of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, with a new Afterword. He has been awarded two NEAs and a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS grant. He was the first James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. He wrote a weekly political column for the Chicago Sun-Times from 2001 till 2005.
Valerie Sayers arrived at Notre Dame in 1993, was named the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English in 2017, and retired as Professor Emerita in June 2021. She is the author of a collection of stories, The Age of Infidelity (2020), and six novels, including The Powers (2013), which explores baseball, pacifism, and 1941 New York in parallel narratives of prose and photography. Her novels Who Do You Love and Brain Fever were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year,” and a film, "Due East," was based on her novels Due East and How I Got Him Back. All six novels have been reprinted in uniform paperback editions from Northwestern University Press. Sayers’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Commonweal, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Agni, Southern Review, Image, Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. A member of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, her literary honors also include a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes for fiction. In the English Department, Sayers served as the Director of Creative Writing (1993-96 and 2001-03) and Department Chair (2011-14). She also served as Acting Director of Africana Studies, where she was affiliated faculty, in 2018. She was honored with the Kaneb, Sheedy, and Joyce Awards for Excellence in Teaching.
John Sitter specializes in eighteenth-century literature and contemporary ecological literature and theory, teaches poetry, satire, and fiction from the Renaissance to the present, and team teaches in the undergraduate Minor in Sustainability. He is author of The Poetry of Pope's "Dunciad,” Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Arguments of Augustan Wit, and The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, which was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2011 by Choice magazine. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry and two volumes of The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Other recent work includes a chapter on poetry from 1740 to 1790 for the revised Cambridge History of English Literature, a chapter on the "poetry of melancholy" for the Blackwell Companion to British Literature, and articles on Samuel Johnson, climate change, and academic responsibility. He received the 2014 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award given by the College of Arts & Letters.
Steve Tomasula is author of the novels Ascension (The University of Alabama Press); VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press); The Book of Portraiture (University of Alabama Press/FC2); IN & OZ (University of Chicago Press); and TOC: A New-Media Novel (University of Alabama Press/FC2 and App for iPad). Over fifty of his short stories have been in magazines like Bomb, McSweeneys, and The Iowa Review. He is the editor of Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art (The University of Alabama Press). A number are collected in Once Human: Stories. Critical essays on art and literature have been published internationally in journals including Leonardo, Kunstforum (Germany), and Circa (Ireland), while his essays and fiction have been included in anthologies such as Musing the Mosaic (SUNY); Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge); Forms at War (University of Alabama Press); Not Normal, Illinois (Indiana University Press); and The Year’s Best SF (NY: Harper Collins). He has given featured readings or keynote addresses at the Universite Paris Sorbonne; The Bowery Poetry Club; KGB, Shakespeare & Company; The Library of Congress; The University of California San Diego; Brown University, and other venues. Incorporating narrative forms of all kinds—from comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reports—Tomasula’s writing has been called a ‘reinvention of the novel,’ crossing visual, as well as written genres, and drawing from science and the arts to take up themes of representation, especially how people picture each other through the languages they use.
Chris R. Vanden Bossche specializes in Victorian fiction and non-fiction prose. He has recently published a study of Victorian conceptions of how to produce social change entitled Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832-1867 (Johns Hopkins University Press). His essays have dealt with family and class as represented in cookery books and David Copperfield, separate spheres and social reform in Ruskin, the idea of authorship in the copyright debates of 1837-1842, and "coming of age" in Victorian literature and culture. In addition, he has published essays on Tennyson, Scott, and other nineteenth-century subjects. He is also the author of a study of the intersections of political and literary authority, Carlyle and the Search for Authority, and editor of Thomas Carlyle's Historical Essays and Past and Present.
Laura Dassow Walls is the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2017, in time to honor Thoreau’s 200th birthday. This book, the first full-length, comprehensive biography of Thoreau in a generation, draws on extensive new research and the full range of Thoreau’s published and unpublished writings to present Thoreau as vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions—fully embedded in his place and time, yet speaking powerfully to the problems and perils of today. Professor Walls works in the field of literature and science, with a special concentration on Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on American Transcendentalism more generally. Her quest to understand 19th-century American literature in its broad political, historical, and philosophical contexts has led to a continuing interest in British and German writers, philosophers, and scientists as well, particularly the German natural scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Her book The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago 2009) traces the Humboldt network from Germany to the Americas in science, politics, literature, and the arts; it earned the Merle Curti Award for intellectual history by the Organization of American Historians, the James Russell Lowell Prize for literary studies by the Modern Language Association, and the Kendrick Prize for literature and science by SLSA, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Her earlier books include Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Wisconsin 1995), Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Cornell 2003), and a volume co-edited with Joel Myerson and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism (2010). She looks forward to exploring American Transcendentalism more broadly as an intellectual, social, and environmental reform movement, and she is now working on a literary biography of the American writer Barry Lopez, who in profound ways has brought the concerns of the Transcendentalists into the turbulent worlds of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, the Center for Humans and Nature, and the William P. and Hazel B. White Foundation.
Henry Weinfield is a poet, translator, and literary scholar. His most recent collections of poetry are A Wandering Aramaean: Passover Poems and Translations (Dos Madres 2012) and Without Mythologies: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Dos Madres 2008). His most recent study is The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge 2012). His verse-translations include a version, with commentary, of the Collected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (University of California Press 1995) and (with Catherine Schlegel of Notre Dame’s Classics Department) a translation of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days (University of Michigan Press 2006). He is also the author of The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk (University of Iowa Press 2009), The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History (Southern Illinois University Press 1991), and many poems, essays, and articles. He is currently working on a new collection of poems and on a translation of the sonnets of the sixteenth-century French poet, Pierre de Ronsard.