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. 

Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight collections of poems, two collections of critical essays and one novella. Two new collections of poems are forthcoming: Sweet Repetition in 2025 from the University of Chicago Press and Twilight with Four Way Books in 2026. Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Cruz earned a BA in English Literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts, an MA in German Language and Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and a PhD at the European Graduate School where her research focused on Hegel and madness. Poetry and Poetics; Aesthetics and Art Criticism; German Literature, Modernist and Contemporary European LIterature; Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis; and German Idealism, especially Hegel.

John Duffy is Professor of English and the Director of the Inspired Leadership Initiative at the University of Notre Dame. John 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  

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,  

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 currently writing a one-volume Introduction to American Literature for Routledge. Her previous works include Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 (Oxford, 2023), Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2011), and Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (North Carolina, 2000). She is the editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A (9th and 10th editions), as well as the co-editor of Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgée (Fordham, 2022) and Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900 (Notre Dame, 2010). She is William R. Kenan Jr. professor of English, a concurrent professor of American Studies, 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. 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 

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. 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), Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (2005), and Rewriting the Word "God": In the Arc of Converging Lines Between Innovative Theory, Theology and Poetry (2025). Her 40+ 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. From 2015-2024, she 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 new lengthy book, Rewrit[ing] the Word "God" , 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, PhD, FSA, is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. She specializes in the literary and cultural perceptions of disability of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Joshua is the author of three monographs: Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020), The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (Ashgate, 2007), and Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Ashgate, 2001). Professor Joshua is currently working on a monograph on disability in Romantic Theatre and is the general editor of the four-volume series, The Oxford Handbooks of Disability and Literatures in English: 700-Present. Name pronunciation: es-AH-kuh 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 (University of Chicago, 2022), investigates marvels like the evil eye and enchanted rings in both philosophy and literature, in both the Latin West and Arabic-speaking world. It argues against the common notion that marvels are objects of belief, credulously accepted by a simple-minded people, 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 (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 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 seas and sea life in medieval literature and philosophy, again drawing on Arabic sources as well as ones from the Latin West. Along with Misty Schieberle, she is also editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer. She has held year-long fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Huntington Library in San Marino, and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. She teaches courses on Chaucer, romance, travel literature, representations of the Middle Ages, and medieval animal literature. She was awarded the Graduate Student Government’s Outstanding Faculty Mentor award in 2022. 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 of Tasavvur, 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. Written with support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Beinecke Library, The Lyre Book was awarded the Northeast Modern Language Association’s Book Award. Kilbane is also the editor of Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures (Amherst College Press, 2025), a collection of essays on digital media and the social life of contemporary poetry, and he is currently writing a book on community-based poetry workshops and other marginalized institutions of verse-making. This latter project has received fellowship support from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and the Newberry Library. 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  

Ann Killian teaches and writes about late medieval literature and devotional culture with particular interest in the history of spirituality and theological education. Her first book, Reforming Lyric: Poetry and Theology in England, 1380-1530, argues that the genre of religious lyric helped establish the English vernacular as a literary language capable of teaching scriptural hermeneutics in the fifteenth century. Her historicizing approach situates short verse within broader material culture and identifies a crucial place for lyric poetry in fifteenth and early sixteenth-century literary history. Killian is currently working on a second book project, Mystical Ecology, which explores ecological thought in medieval visionary writing and the ways in which the mystical tradition has influenced twentieth-century critiques of extractive capitalism.  Killian has published articles in Speculum, Spiritus, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and The Yearbook of Langland Studies. She teaches courses on medieval lyric, early European drama, and medieval women’s writing. Before coming to Notre Dame, she was Assistant Professor of English at Ohio Dominican University in Columbus, OH. Between 2021-23, she served as the inaugural Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medieval Institute, Notre Dame. She has taught with the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program and the Moreau College Initiative.  Sister Annie is a vowed member of the Dominican Sisters of Peace, a congregation of Catholic women religious. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Commonweal Magazine, Global Sisters Report, and Christian Century. Medieval literature and religion; poetry and poetics; manuscript and book history; the art of preaching; translation; women's writing

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 is an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame and teaches on Global Anglophone literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first century, with a particular emphasis on the novel. He is finishing a book project concerning representations of urban space in postcolonial literature, taking Dublin, Lagos, Johannesburg, and Hong Kong as its key sites and case studies. His critical work has appeared or forthcoming in Cultural Critique, the Journal of the African Literature Association, Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: a Forum on Fiction, and Research in African Literatures, among other venues. Global Anglophone literature, history and theory of the novel, postcolonial studies, comparative modernisms, aesthetic theory, political economy, sociology of literature

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). His Languages, Legends, and American Dreams: The Emergence of English in Multilingual America, 1759-1850, is forthcoming from Oxford in 2026, and his Mythologies of English, a guest-edited issues of the Journal of English Linguistics, in 2027.  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 (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). The novel, comparative literature, modernism, Irish literature, western European literature, Latin American literature, world literature 

Peter McQuillan, Associate Professor of English, holds a B.A. and M.A. from University College, Dublin, and a Ph.D. in Celtic languages and literatures from Harvard University. Before coming to Notre Dame, he held the Sir John Rhys Studentship in Celtic Studies at Jesus College, Oxford University, and taught Irish at the University of Regensburg in Germany and at Harvard. He has published articles in the Journal of Celtic Linguistics and Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, and is currently preparing material for publication in Ériu and Éigse. He is the author of Modality and the Subjunctive Mood in Irish (2002) and Native and Natural: Aspects of the Concepts of Right and Freedom in Irish (2004), an analysis of the transformation of concepts of rights and freedom as expressed in the Irish language. In February 2019, he delivered the annual Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture, a signature event in the Keough-Naughton Institute's academic year. His theme: "Remarks on the History of Social and Political Concepts in Irish."

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 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 

Brandon Menke is a poet and assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he is affiliated faculty with the Program in Gender Studies. 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, literary space, 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 details 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 such poets and artists as Hart Crane, Marsden Hartley, Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Paul Cadmus, 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 from New York University. 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 served as a Guest Critic in the Yale School of Art.   Poetry and poetics; 20th- and 21st-century American literatures, art, and visual culture; queer theory, lyric theory, and aesthetics; sexuality, race, and gender studies; regionalism and cosmopolitanism; multilingual (post)modernism; literary space; temporality; environmental humanities and feminist ecologies; psychological forms and sociological approaches; transmediation; hybrid forms; experimental criticism; collaboration; translation; mysticism and the supernatural

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 

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

Amy Mulligan (M.Phil, D.Phil, University of Oxford) conducts research and publishes on the languages, literatures and cultures of medieval Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia, with particular emphasis on cultural and literary exchange among the Irish, Welsh, English and Scandinavian peoples in the medieval North Atlantic. She is an associate professor in the Department of Irish Language and Literature. Her monograph A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250 (Manchester University Press, 2019) won the American Conference of Irish Studies' Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book. The research and writing for A Landscape of Words was supported by two prestigious fellowships. In 2015, Professor Mulligan won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. With her 2016 Fulbright award, she spent a year at the University of Nottingham, which houses the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age and the Institute for Name-Studies. Professor Mulligan’s earlier projects and publications have explored non-normative corporeality, gender and national identity in medieval Irish and Old Norse-Icelandic literature. Professor Mulligan has also written about poets and political literary myths, gender, sovereignty and depictions of the body politic, and the role of geography in Irish and Icelandic narratives. She is co-editor of Moving Words: Literacies, Texts and Verbal Communities of the Nordic Middle Ages (Brepols, 2019). Her publications have appeared in the journals Speculum, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Studies in Philology, and Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, and in the volumes Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Norman Tradition and Transcultural Heritage (Ashgate, 2013). In addition to her NEH and Fulbright awards, she has held major research fellowships at the University of Oxford, the Centre for Viking and Medieval Studies (Oslo), University of Michigan, the Institute for Research in the Humanities (Madison, Wisconsin), and the Centre for Medieval Studies (Bergen). Professor Mulligan is an active faculty fellow in Notre Dame's Medieval Institute and Gender Studies Program. In additional research focus of hers is the Irish American experience in Chicago, including its roots in medieval Ireland. She is currently writing a book titled Medieval Chicago: Irishness, Whiteness, and the Allure of the Past 1871-1934.

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  

Clíona Ní Ríordáin is a critic and translator. She holds a doctorate from the University of Lyon Lumière, post-graduate degrees from the Sorbonne, the Sorbonne Nouvelle and University College Cork, and an undergraduate degree from Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Before joining Notre Dame, she taught Irish literature and translation studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle from 2003-2023. She is the editor of four anthologies of Irish poetry, and two collections of essays, Speaking Like a Spanish Cow (Ibidem 2019) and The Poets and Poetry of Munster (Ibidem 2023). She co-authored Irlande: histoire, société, culture, with Maurice Goldring (La Découverte, 2012). Her monograph, English Language Poets in University College Cork (Palgrave 2020), was the first to explore the work of a generation of Irish poets who came to maturity after Donogh O’Malley’s 1967 education act. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can (Lilliput 2022), her translation of Maylis Besserie’s first novel was a Financial Times book of the year in 2022. Her most recent publication is a personal anthology of the poems of Gerry Murphy, Plus loin encore (Circe, 2023), co-edited and co-translated with Paul Bensimon. She is an Irish government appointee to the strategy committee of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Her research interests include contemporary Irish literature, especially poetry, in Irish and English, the sociology of literature, translation studies, and sociolinguistics. She would be happy to supervise students in any of those areas.  

Francisco Eduardo Robles teaches and researches American Literatures (particularly Multiethnic American Literature) of the twentieth century.His book, Coalition Literature: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury US Multiethnic Writing, examines mid-twentieth century literary and musical representations of migration, labor, and protest in the United States. Coalition Literature traces a distinctive genealogy of coalitional aesthetics focused on migration, providing significant literary theoretical and literary historical treatment works by Zora Neale Hurston, Muriel Rukeyser, Sanora Babb, Carlos Bulosan, Woody Guthrie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Memphis Sanitation Strike poet-activists, Tomás Rivera, and the authors included in This Bridge Called My Back. The aesthetic innovation these works display emerges from the particular methods of speaking with that they contain, whether it's overcoming exclusion by finding new ways of representing migrants through word and sound, or in the ways these authors conceive of migrancy as a modality that necessitates innovation. The lineage of coalitional aesthetics, present in American midcentury multiethnic writing, sustained  and indeed extended the Popular Front and its legacies. He is  a co-convener of the Desert Futures Collective, an editor at Post45: Contemporaries, and he is currently working on two distinct projects: the first on Latinx poetry and its reimagining of elegy’s scalar possibilities, and the other on desert spaces in literature. At Notre Dame, he has taught a variety of classes on topics including US Literature (especially in African American and Latinx Literature), Migration, Queer Literature and Film, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, and the debates around the Great American Novel. Migration, Latinx Poetry, Contemporary Latinx Literature, Desert Studies, Twentieth Century American Literature 

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 a scholar, critic, essayist, and novelist, best known for his work on war, war literature, and the philosophical challenges posed by climate change. He is the author of six 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 (2016), has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities (2014), a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction (2017), and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literary Criticism (2024), and held the inaugural Teaching Lab Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (2021).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 

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