Faculty

Chris Abram's research brings early medieval literature from Great Britain and Scandinavia into conversation with contemporary discourses on religion, poetics, and the environment. He regularly teaches Old English and Old Norse language and literature, and has published on the sagas, skaldic poetry, Old English verse, Beowulf, and the transmission of homiletic texts around the North Sea cultural zone. Norse mythology is perhaps the most important area of focus in his work, both in its historical settings and its lingering and often surprising reverberations in modern art and life. He is currently working on a monograph that is tentatively entitled Experiments with Beowulf, in which he proposes a number of new "post-philological" reading strategies for the Old English poem. Old English Literature, Old Norse Literature, poetry, ecocriticism, mythology  

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  

Dionne Irving Bremyer is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Irving Bremyer writes fiction and nonfiction that investigates and questions personal, cultural, and national hybridity emergent in a postcolonial world. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. Two essays, “Treading Water” and “Do You Like to Hurt,” were notable essays in Best American Essays 2017 and 2019. She is the author of the novel Quint (7.13 Books) is a fictional retelling of the true story of the Dionne Quintuplets. Her short story collection The Islands (Catapult Books) follows the lives of Jamaican women—immigrants or the descendants of immigrants—who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism. Her edited collection Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representations (Demeter Press)include essays that deal with the varied and complicated ways in which cultural attitudes about mothering and female sexuality inform the way people understand, embrace, reject, and talk about breastfeeding. Irving Bremyer been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and has been awarded two Tennessee Williams scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a scholarship and residency from the Voices of Our Nation Writers Conference. Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Writing, Caribbean Literatures, Contemporary Literature, Antiracist Writing Pedagogies, African American Literature, Narratology.  

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal is Ruth and Paul Idzik Collegiate Chair in Digital Scholarship and Assistant Professor of English and Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He researches and teaches about the aesthetic and politico-economic entanglements of our technological cultures. His award-winning writing appears, or is forthcoming, in Critical Inquiry, Configurations, American Literature, and Design Issues, among other venues.He holds a Ph.D. in English and STS from UC Davis and a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Indore. He has also previously been a visiting fellow at the research Cluster “Media of Cooperation” in University of Siegen, Germany and a graduate student at the Universe of Chicago. His research—which is situated at the crossroads of media theory, science and technology studies, and literary criticism—has been supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Linda Hall Library, and the Hagley Museum, among other institutions.Professor Dhaliwal is currently working on a book project titled Rendering: A Political Diagrammatology of Computation, which asks 'what exactly is computing?' Illuminating the hard-coded political logics we take for granted in our contemporary digital cultures, his project shows how our cultural narratives, politico-economic formulations, and epistemic beliefs get crystallized into computational hardware and software architectures.His other projects have found him researching the entanglements between data and narratives, popular discourses of the future in simulation videogames, material and cultural histories of artificial intelligence, and new taxonomies of internet aesthetics. He is also engaged in several critical making projects, including a number of public-facing game design endeavours. More information about his work can be found at ranjodhdhaliwal.com. Media Studies; Science and Technology Studies; Critical Theory; 20th- and 21st-century Art, Literature and Culture; Race, Labor and Political Economy; Game Studies; Science Fiction Studies; Critical Making. 

John Duffy is The William T. and Helen Kuhn Carey Professor of Modern Communication in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame. He has published on the ethics of writing, the 1619 Project, the rhetoric of disability, and the historical development of literacy in cross-cultural contexts. In his recent book, Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing, he examines the ethical dimensions of teaching writing in a post-truth world. John is co-editor of three volumes: After Plato: Ethics, Rhetoric and Writing Studies; Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research Ten Years After Literacy in American Lives; and Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, & Discourse. His monograph, Writing from These Roots, was awarded the 2009 Outstanding Book Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and his book, Provocations of Virtue received honorable mention for the 2022 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize. He has published essays in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics, and elsewhere. John is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and received the 2022 Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor in the College of Arts & Letters. He teaches courses in rhetoric, writing, and literature, and serves as a Faculty Fellow in the Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights and the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience.   Ethics, Rhetoric, Public Speaking, Writing Pedagogy, The 1619 Project  

Barbara Green is Professor of English and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching focus on modern feminist print culture and periodical studies, women’s writing, life writing, and studies of gender and modernity. She is the author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture (2017), Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905-1938 (1997), and she is the co-editor of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939 (2017). She was the co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies from 2015 through 2022 (Penn State University Press). She is currently the Co-President of The Society of the Space Between, Literature and Culture Between the Wars. Twentieth-Century Women’s Literature, Modern Periodical Studies, Feminist Print Culture, Gender and Modernism/Modernity, Suffrage Studies, Middlebrow Culture, Autobiography/Life-Writing.  

Sandra M. Gustafson is the author of works on American literature and culture including Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2011), Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (North Carolina, 2000), and essays on William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Jonathan Edwards, and Margaret Fuller, among many others. She is the editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A (9th and 10th editions) and advisory editor of the MLA-affiliated journal Early American Literature, as well as the co-editor of Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900 (Notre Dame, 2010), and guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of the Early Republic on political writing and literature. A faculty affiliate of Notre Dame's Center for Civil and Human Rights and a faculty fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, she held an NEH fellowship during 2014 to work on a book about the American novel and the early peace movement, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her co-edited volume (with Robert S. Levine) Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgée appears from Fordham University Press in 2022. American literature and culture, the American novel, political theory, peace studies, and the study of civil and human rights, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity 

Johannes Göransson has books in many different genre, ranging from lyric poems to impossible theater and criticism. He has also published books by many prominent Swedish, Finland Swedish and Korean poets, including Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Eva Kristina Olsson, Henry Parland and Kim Yideum. He teaches classes in poetry writing, gothic literature and translation theory. American Poetry, Swedish Poetry, Poetry in Translation, Translation Theory,  

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

Romana Huk’s books include Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (1996), Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally (2003), and Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (2005). Her 50+ substantial essays on poetics have appeared in journals such as Contemporary Literature, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Christianity and Literature, HOW2, Literature Compass, The University of Toronto Quarterly, The Journal (in Ireland), Journal of Innovative British and Irish Poetry and Performance Research, and in book collections from presses including Oxford UP, Cambridge UP, Blackwell, Macmillan, Cornell UP, Ohio UP, Edinburgh UP, Bloodaxe Books, Salt Publishing, and Le Cri Editions in Paris. She serves as a repeated referee for the major journals in her field, from PMLA and Contemporary Literature to Paideuma, Twentieth-Century Literature, Christianity and Literature and Women: A Cultural Review, and for major presses from Oxford UP and Cambridge UP to Routledge, Palgrave, Blackwell, Liverpool UP, Polity and Bloomsbury Academic; she also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Innovative British and Irish Poetry in the UK. Since 2015 she has served as Editor-in-Chief of Religion & Literature, housed in the Department of English at Notre Dame. She has written on topics ranging from working class poetry to gender politics to racial inflections in radical practice to emerging issues around theopoetics. Her next book is entitled, “‘Rewrit[ing] the word ‘God’”: In the Arc of Converging Lines Between Innovative Theory, Theology and Poetry; it involves rereading twentieth-century phenomenology, theology and literary theory alongside developments in transnational avant-garde poetries. Modern and Contemporary British and Irish poetry, Transatlantic postmodern poetics, Black British poetry and poetics, Lyric theory, Phenomenological thinking, Philosophy of religion, Theopoetics  

Modernism and Modernity, Literature of the Americas, 19th, 20th and 21st-Century American Literature, 19th and 20th-Centurey African-American Literature and Culture, Literary, Feminist, Cultural and Postcolonial theories, Intersectionality

Essaka Joshua has published three monographs and numerous articles and chapters on Romantic and Victorian literature. Joshua currently specializes in Disability Studies and is engaged in a book project on disability in British Romantic theatre. Disability Studies, Romantic-era and Victorian British Literature, Myth and Folklore

Michelle Karnes studies late medieval literature in its philosophical and religious context. Her most recent book, Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World investigates marvels like the evil eye and enchanted rings in both philosophy and literature, in both the Latin West and Islamic communities. It argues against the common notion that marvels are objects of belief and proposes instead that they are near impossibilities that demand scrutiny and investigation. They rely on the faculty of imagination, which is unrestricted by the distinction between the real and unreal, the true and the false. In her reading, the faculty gives marvels their indeterminacy and significance. Her first book, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, explores the role of imagination in medieval religious meditations and theories of cognition to show how the intellectual force of imagination contributes to its narrative power. Her current project focuses on the representation of animals and the role of species diversity in medieval literature and philosophy, again drawing on Arabic sources as well as ones from the Latin West. She has held year-long fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Huntington Library, and Yale’s Institute for Sacred Music. Along with Sebastian Sobecki, she is also editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Medieval literature, philosophy, and religion written in Arabic, Latin, English, French, Castilian, and Italian; religion and literature; comparative literature; history of science; animal studies; history of imagination 

Dr. Mehak F. Khan is Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests span different modes of contemporary culture from the novel to social media. Her writing is forthcoming in Philological Encounters , Critical Pakistan Studies, and other venues. Dr. Khan holds a Ph.D in English with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in English with a minor in Game Design from New York University. Professor Khan's current research is on theories and modes of strangeness that coalesce around the concept of "ajeeb" aesthetics - a framework that folds in affect theory, queer theory, and aesthetic theory. Other projects include an exploration of questions of state failure and game logics. She writes fiction and nonfiction, and is a founding editor ofTasavvur, a magazine for speculative South Asian fiction. South Asian literature, game studies, gender and sexuality, theories of the global south

Matthew Kilbane teaches and writes about modern and contemporary poetry in the U.S., poetry and music, the history of sound technologies, and digital literary cultures. His first book, The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), unfolds a disciplinary meeting place for literary and media studies around modern lyric poetry. Opening our lyric archives to such things as pop songs, radio poems, closet operas, and speech-music, the book’s media theory of the lyric shows how literary scholars can look to media history to understand transformations in the social life of poetry, and how media archaeologists can read lyric forms for insight into the cultural history of technology. The Lyre Book was awarded the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2021 Book Award, and has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Beinecke Library, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell.Kilbane is currently extending this focus on lyric techniques and technologies in two newer projects: an edited collection of essays exploring how social media platforms are reshaping poetry’s publics around the world, and a study of community-based writing workshops and other marginalized institutions of verse making.Before arriving at Notre Dame, Kilbane served as the Joseph F. Martino Lecturer at Cornell, where he also taught with the Cornell Prison Education Program. 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture; poetry and poetics; sound studies; media theory; digital humanities  

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  

Liam Kruger teaches on Global Anglophone literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first century, with a particular emphasis on the novel in Africa. Professor Kruger's current research concerns representations of urban space in postcolonial literature, taking Dublin, Lagos, Johannesburg, and Hong Kong as its key sites and case studies. He is also co-organizer of Virtual Publics in the Memosphere, a public humanities project at Dartmouth College. His writing has appeared in Research in African Literatures, Modern Fiction Studies, and Cultural Critique, among other venues. Global Anglophone literature, history and theory of the novel, postcolonial studies, comparative modernisms, aesthetic theory, political economy, sociology of literature

Greg Kucich specializes in British Romanticism and is a Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. He has written extensively on Keats, Shelley and their literary forebears, Edmund Spenser in particular. His first book is titled Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (Pennsylvania State Press). For 13 years he co-edited with Keith Hanley (Lancaster University) the interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts. This project issued in a book, co-edited with Hanley, on Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Global Formations Past and Present (Routledge). His extensive work on the Keats-Hunt Circle includes the editing, with Jeffrey Cox, of two volumes of The Selected Works of Leigh Hunt (Pickering and Chatto). Most recently he has written numerous articles on Romantic Drama and Romantic women's historiography while editing a book, with Beth Lau and Daniel Johnson, on Keats's Reading / Reading Keats (Palgrave). He has also produced with Lau and Johnson a digital edition of Keats's substantial markings of Paradise Lost as part of an ongoing project of digitizing Ketas's marginalia titled The Keats Library https://keatslibrary. British Romanticism, Women's Writing; Romantic Drama, Keats-Hunt Circle, Women's Historiography, Cosmopolitanism  

Jesse Lander is interested in the intersection of religion and literary culture in early modern England. He is currently completing a book provisionally entitled Special Affects: Staging the Supernatural in Shakespeare’s Drama. This project combines intellectual history and theater history to provide an account of the technologies used to stage supernatural phenomena in Henry VI, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. In addition, he is researching a second book-length project on the history of Shakespeare quotation. Shakespeare and early modern drama, histories of the book, religion and literature, intellectual history, history of historiography, textual criticism  

Tim William Machan is Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His teaching and research involve both medieval language and literature and historical English linguistics. Focusing on Norse, Latin, and French as well as English, his medieval scholarship has explored the interplay among a variety of theoretical and practical concerns, including the cultural nuances of physical documents, literary expression, linguistic conventions, multilingualism, contact between English and other traditions, and the historicity of critical approaches. In English linguistics, he has examined individual and institutional responses to language change, the shifting status of varieties within the English linguistic repertoire, and the persistence of language attitudes from the medieval period until the present. His most recent books are English Begins at Jamestown: Narrating the History of a Language (Oxford, 2022) and Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages (Manchester 2020). He has held grants and fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and Fulbright Foundation. historical English linguistics; medieval language and literature; history of the book  

Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English and is also affiliated with the Gender Studies Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience. Marcus specializes in American and African American literature, popular music, sound, and performance from the 19th century through the present. Her most recent book, Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023), argues that the defining American texts of the twentieth century are records of disappointment. Attending to an interracial, interdisciplinary archive that encompasses U.S. and African American literature, sound, performance, and visual art from Reconstruction’s aftermath through the Reagan era, this book tells a new cultural history of the century, reclaiming the unrealized desire for liberation as a productive force in American literature and life.   Marcus’s first book, Girls to the Front (Harper Perennial, 2010), a critical and cultural history of the 1990s punk-feminist movement Riot Grrrl, was a National Award for Arts Writing finalist. Her essays and criticism on art, music, literature, and politics have appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Bookforum, Dissent, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times.   Marcus is currently at work on a new research project that asks how emerging media and communication technologies influence conflicts about race, gender, and sexuality, and how these conflicts and influences register in literature. This project focuses on 1890–1940 in the United States, a time when new media technologies proliferated amid explosive fights over depictions of gendered, sexual, and racialized subjectivities and behaviors. By exploring concurrent histories of media evolution, sexual revolution, racial self-determination, and attempts to regulate these—and by analyzing how songs, novels, and other cultural objects represented and mediated these historical pressures—the project will amount to a media history of this fraught period’s wars over morality and selfhood, enabling a clearer understanding of how media change and social change shape each other. American literature and culture, African American literature and culture, sound studies, popular music, performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, creative nonfiction

I am a teacher and scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century media, literature, and communications systems. I have a background in technology journalism, and my earliest work deals with the temporalities of fiction that engaged with those being produced by new technologies and scientific epistemologies. In my first book, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), I discuss literature’s mediality by way of its communication systems by looking at how communication is figured in the making-visible of infrastructure. My second book, Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century (forthcoming University of Chicago Press, 2023), looks back on two decades of twenty-first century cultural production to account for the rise of genre hybridity in literary fiction. I explore the convergence of desires for nonhuman narration in theory and in fiction—in new materialist fantasies of object agency and in the surprisingly weird interruptions of literary realism—to account for genre’s appeal across cultural forms in these decades. I serve on the faculty of the History and Philosophy of Science, and am a member of the steering committee for the Moreau College Initiative, a transformative prison education program. I am also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, and co-edit the Post45 book series at Stanford UP. media and technology, literary theory, narrative, the novel, modern and contemporary literature, genre 

Barry McCrea is a novelist and scholar of comparative literature. He is the author of three books, Languages of the Night, winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016, In the Company of Strangers which was awarded the Heyman prize for scholarship in the humanities, and a novel, The First Verse, which won a number of awards including the Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and a Barnes and Noble “Discover” prize. The First Verse was published in Spanish and in German. He teaches both comparative courses on broad themes dealing with literature in English, French, Irish, Italian, and Spanish (“Class, Desire, and the Novel”, “Narrative”, “The Novel in Europe”), and seminars on more specific topics (“Ulysses”, “Proust”, “Modern Irish Poetry”). Before joining Notre Dame, he taught at Yale University, where he was appointed full professor of comparative literature in 2012. Professor McCrea is co-director and founder of the International Network for the Comparative Humanities (inch.princeton.edu). He teaches fall semesters in the Rome and Dublin Global Gateways, and spring semesters on campus. The novel, comparative literature, modernism, gay and lesbian studies, Irish literature, western European literature, Latin American literature, world literature 

2022 Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of nine books spanning poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. Her debut volume The Red Bird (2001) was selected by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series; her verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (2012) inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights. McSweeney's most recent poetry collection, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), called a "frightening and brilliant book" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker, was featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, MS., the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere and awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her influential essay collection The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) proposes a decadent ecopoetics and reads modern and contemporary literature in light of ecological phenomenon such as mutation, extinction and decay. McSweeney is a co-translator of the award-winning Yi Sang, Selected Works (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she is a co-founder of the international press Action Books, which has built US readerships for poets from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere while advocating for translators and the act of translation itself. In 2022, McSweeney was recognized with the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, honoring exceptional accomplishment in any genre. McSweeney is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and has twice been awarded The Rev. Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Creative writing, poetry, poetics, translation, sound, performance, literary form, dramatic form, genre, prophecy, decadence, ecopoetics  

An NEA Fellow, Orlando Ricardo Menes was born in Lima, Perú, to Cuban parents but has lived most of his life in the U.S. He considers himself Cuban American. Since 2000 he has taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he is Professor of English. Menes is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds (University of New Mexico Press, 2022), Memoria (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), and Heresies (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). He also won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for Fetish (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like POETRY, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and the Hudson Review, among many others. In addition, Menes is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009). poetry, poetry writing, Caribbean literature, translation

Brandon Menke is a poet and a postdoctoral scholar in English Literature at the University of Notre Dame. He teaches and researches American literatures and visual art of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on poetry and poetics, LGBTQ* studies and queer theory, visual culture, and transmediation. His current book project, Slow Tyrannies: Queer Lyricism, Visual Regionalism, and the Transfigured World, examines lyric form, regionalist aesthetics, and networks of queer intimacy in American literature and visual art from the 1920s to the 1970s. The book uncovers and traces the development of a reparative and regenerative queer lyricism distinguished by its commitments to intermediality, homoerotic desire, past time, and originary place. Based on how poets and artists such as Hart Crane, Marsden Hartley, Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, Grant Wood, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery bridge image and text, the project deviates from normative schematizations of verbal-visual relations, which have tended to present poetry and painting as embattled camps vying for cultural authority. Slow Tyrannies considers how media are syncretized through novel approaches to signification and aesthetic space that resist stigmatization and affirm queer forms of being. Dr. Menke received his Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Yale University and his MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from New York University. While at Yale, he co-coordinated American Literature in the World with Wai Chee Dimock and co-organized the Graduate Poets Reading Series, among other initiatives. He has served as an assistant editor of The Yale Review, poetry editor and editor-in-chief of Palimpsest: Yale Graduate Literary and Arts Magazine, and poetry editor of Washington Square Review. He is a visual artist and designer and has been a Guest Critic in the Yale School of Art. As part of his creative writing practice, Dr. Menke is currently at work on a manuscript with fellow poet Jahan Khajavi that mines the deep cultural archive of homoerotic imagery in the Wild West; their poems metabolize and celebrate the iconography of the gay cowboy while undercutting such mythopoetics with an awareness of the real, contested space of the American frontier and the violent erasure of its Native peoples and ecologies. Dr. Menke’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, Court Green, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Post45: Contemporaries, bæst: a journal of queer forms & affects, Columbia Journal, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Susannah Brietz Monta is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2005, paperback 2009; winner, Book of the Year award, Conference on Christianity and Literature), Teaching Early Modern English Prose (MLA, 2010, co-edited with Margaret W. Ferguson), and A Catholic Reads The Faerie Queene: Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune (Manchester UP, 2016). She was the editor of Religion and Literature from 2008 to 2015, and is currently a co-editor of Spenser Studies. She is a founding co-editor of the series Catholicisms, ca. 1450-1800 for Durham University's Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and has served as vice-president and president of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. She has published over thirty articles on topics including martyrology, hagiography, devotional poetry and prose, and religion and literature methodology. Current projects include a co-edited scholarly edition of the Lives of St. Philip Howard and Anne Dacre Howard, earl and countess of Arundel, for the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies (with Elizabeth Patton and Earle Havens), a five-volume complete works of Robert Southwell for Oxford University Press (with Peter Davidson and Emily Ransom), and a monograph on prayer, poetry, and repetition in the Reformation era. Her work has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame, and Oxford University’s John Fell Fund. devotional lyric, religion and literature, hagiography, devotional prose, early modern Catholicism  

Ernest Morrell is the Coyle Professor of Literacy Education, a member of the faculty in the English and Africana Studies Departments, and Director of the Center for Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame. Ernest is also director of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) James R. Squire Office for Policy Research in the English Language Arts. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, an elected Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Since 2015, Ernest has been annually ranked among the top university-based education scholars in the RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings published by EdWeek. Ernest is also the recipient of the NCTE Distinguished Service Award, the Kent Williamson Leadership Award from the Conference on English Leadership, and the Divergent Award for Excellence in 21st-Century Literacies. His scholarly interests include: critical pedagogy, English education, literacy studies, postcolonial studies, and youth popular culture.  Ernest has authored 100 articles, research briefs, and book chapters and 15 scholarly books including Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (Columbia, 2020), Stories from Inequity to Justice in Literacy Education, New Directions in Teaching English, and Critical Media Pedagogy: Teaching for Achievement in City Schools, which was awarded Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. Ernest has earned numerous commendations for his university teaching including UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He received his Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Culture from the University of California, Berkeley where he was the recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation award. Critical pedagogy, English education, literacy studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora cultural studies

Chanté Mouton Kinyon is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Kinyon’s primary research explores transnational Black American literature and culture, with a particular interest in the way in which Black American culture and literature intersects with Irish culture and literature. The 2019–2021 Moreau Postdoctoral Fellow (ND), Kinyon was previously the 2018–2019 NEH Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. African American Literature, 20th Century Irish Literature, Crime Fiction, Queer Literature, Transnational Literature

Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Named one of the writers to watch for fall 2021 by Publishers Weekly, Navarro Aquino is the author of the novel, Velorio out from HarperCollins and in Spanish from HarperCollins Español. His fiction has appeared in Tin House magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Guernica, among others. Navarro Aquino has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College. Postcolonial Studies, Caribbean Literature, Hispanic/Latinx Literature, Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary Poetry, African and African American Literature 

Ian Newman works on literature, theater, song, politics, aesthetics, and urban space across the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Britain and Ireland. He is the author of the book "The Romantic Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution". He is also the co-editor, with Oskar Cox Jensen and David Kennerley of "Charles Dibdin & Late Georgian Culture," a collection of essays examining the varied career and legacy of the theater impresario, popular song writer, and author Charles Dibdin. He is the guest editor of a special issue of Studies In Romanticism on "Song and the City" (Winter 2019), and is co-editor with David O'Shaughnessy of "Charles Macklin and the Theatres of London". He is a board member of the Nineteenth-century Song Club. He is the author of an online project tracing the meeting places of the London Corresponding Society, and a founding editor of the Keats Letters Project. His most recent online project is the Francis Place Ballad Project, which examines songs "heard about the streets of London" in the 1780s. He has been a visiting scholar in the music department at King’s College London for the project “Music in London 1800-1851,” and a resident associate at the National Humanities Center. His recent research focuses on the relationship between popular song, theatre song, and ballads, and their transmission and circulation across the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. 18th- and 19th-century British and Irish Literature, Sociability, Radicalism, Song and Ballads, History of London, Theatre History  

Dr. Francisco E. Robles teaches and researches in American Literatures of the twentieth century, focusing in particular on Multi-Ethnic American Literature.His current book project, Migrant Modes: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury U.S. Multiethnic Writing, examines literary and musical representations of migrants in the United States, spanning from the 1930s into the 1980s. The book traces a distinctive genealogy of coalitional aesthetics focused on migration, providing significant literary theoretical and literary historical treatment of texts across several genres. Migrant Modes includes discussions of work by Zora Neale Hurston, Muriel Rukeyser, Sanora Babb, Carlos Bulosan, Woody Guthrie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Memphis Sanitation Strike activists, Américo Paredes, Tomás Rivera, Los Lobos, Odetta, and the authors included in /This Bridge Called My Back./ Dr. Robles is also a co-convener of the Desert Futures Collective: https://desertfutures.yale.edu/. Dr. Robles's current research focuses on literary and musical representations of migrants in the United States. By exploring the historical and political ramifications of migration in twentieth century American literatures, he constructs a narrative history and analysis of representational experiments that seek to manifest direct democracy within their texts — as well as the many different aesthetic modes these authors and musicians use to achieve this attempted unity of politics and aesthetics. The authors and singers he researches seek to experiment with novel ways of incorporating other voices. These works move and flow in unexpected and imaginatively powerful ways that create new ethical praxes for engaging in and understanding textual representation. At Notre Dame, Dr. Robles has taught a variety of classes on topics including American Literatures (especially in African American and Latinx Literature), Migration, Queer Literature and Film, and Contemporary Poetry and Prose. Dr. Robles also conducts research on desert spaces in literature, particularly the Sonoran Desert, and he is part of the Desert Futures Collective. More broadly, he gives talks and presentations on African American Literature, Chicanx Literature, Literatures of the United States, Southwestern Literature, Lamentation, Elegy, and Grief, Coalitional Aesthetics, and the Popular Front and its legacies. Multi-Ethnic American Literatures, African American Literature, Literatures of Migration, Migration Studies, Queer Theory and LGBTQ* Literature, Comparative Desert Studies. 

Specialties: Twentieth and twenty-first-century African American and Afro-Latin American literature and culture. A professor of English and Africana Studies, Sanders specializes in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, American and African American poetics, race theory, the African American novel, African American autobiography, and Afro-Latin American Literature and culture. His publications include Semantics of the World: Selected Poems of Rómulo Bustos Aguirre (co-edited and co-translated with Nohora Arrieta Fernández), A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence, Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South (co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell), and Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. Sanders’s undergraduate and graduate courses on exploring issues of racial and cultural identity, citizenship, and freedom across the Western Hemisphere. Also, Sanders serves as the Director of the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience.  American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, American and African American poetics, race theory, the African American novel, African American autobiography, and Afro-Latin American Literature and culture 

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

Yasmin Solomonescu specializes in British Romanticism across genres, with emphasis on the question of literature’s role in representing and eliciting new ethical and political sensibilities. Her various approaches to that question often involve consideration of the period’s emergent scientific psychology and revolutionary social and political movements, and always involve attention to the distinctive work of literary language, genre, and form.Solomonescu is currently writing a book entitled Reimagining Persuasion in British Romantic Literature that considers how Romantic writers fundamentally re-conceived of the theory and practice of persuasion, notably by insisting on the ethical and aesthetic value of persuasions that are at best provisional—“for a moment,” as Thomas De Quincey put it. Focusing on major and neglected works by George Campbell, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Godwin, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and Austen, among others, the book makes a wider case for the importance this distinctive sense of persuasion to civic and critical discourse today. The project has received the support of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, USA, and Chawton House, England. Solomonescu is also co-editing Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romantic Period, under contract with Oxford University Press.Solomonescu’s first book, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination, advances the critical recovery of the political reformer John Thelwall and of the materialist science of his time. The project was supported by doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. British Romanticism, persuasion and rhetoric, cognitive approaches to literature, form and style, literary theory 

Professor Thomas, raised as a mobile military brat, is not exactly from any one place but keeps the USA West Coast close to heart due to extended family there, He began his higher education at the University of North Dakota, earning a 1988 BA in Honors and Philosophy, with Minors in English and Music. His 1996 Ph.D in English was completed at the University of California, Davis, with a dissertation on Oscar Wilde. His subsequent research and teaching took was at three institutions: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; George Washington University, Washington, DC.; and the University of Notre Dame. In Germany, he studied one year as an undergraduate and later taught one year as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow, respectively, in Freiburg and Mainz. British Victorian and Modernist Literature and Culture, Critical Theory, Social Theory, Language Theory, Philosophy, Music History and Theory, Art History  

Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. She is the author of Call Me Zebra, named a Best Book of the Year by over twenty publications and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, the John Gardner Award, and long listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. Her other novels include Savage Tongues and Fra Keeler, for which she received a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" award. She is the 2023-2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fiction Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. A recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the Aspen Institute, and MacDowell, her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review among other places. In 2020, she founded Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance, a conversation series focused on the intersection of the arts and transformational migrations. Born in Los Angeles, she spent her childhood in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Spain, and speaks Farsi, Italian, and Spanish. She is the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.   Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing; Middle Eastern, Latin American, Iberian Literature, and American Literatures; Global Anglophone Literatures; Literatures of Exile/Migration; Ethics and Aesthetics of the Novel; Literary Ecology