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| Degrees :: Masters :: MA in Literary and Cultural Studies :: | ||||||||||||||
| Faculty |
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 Undergraduate
MAPW
MA Rhetoric MDes
CPID Application
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I am interested in how concepts travel in a global context, especially how modern discourses, such as science or technology, become selectively appropriated or even refashioned as they travel from the West to the non-West. In my book manuscript, Tracking Modernity: India, Trains, and the Culture of Mobility, I consider the technological space of the railway in the context of India. Since 1853, the train has been the most important material emblem of India's modernity. Through a study of public discourse, literature, film and other visual culture, I show the ways officials, writers, and visual artists presented the train as a dynamic microcosm so they could explore tensions inherent in their larger communities. I argue that the train's representation allowed fantasies of mobility to take shape within larger narratives of historical progress, national identity, and technological dominion. At Carnegie Mellon, I teach on numerous topics, including Culture and Globalization, Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Literature and Film, Global Women's Writing, and Race and Ethnicity in a Global Context. My articles have appeared in such journals as Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, and Rethinking Marxism, as well as in edited book collections. My teaching and research have focused on writers'
relation to their publics and the impact of new print media on literary
writing and critical theory in 19th century Britain and the U.S.
I have published The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790-1832
as well as essays on Romanticism, the history of critical theory,
and the sociology of culture. Currently I am working on the debate
concerning historicism, postmodernity, and the restructuring of
cultural and political institutions. I am especially interested in what can be discovered
about imaginative and argumentative texts from medieval and early
modern England through the use of contemporary critical theories.
I founded and for many years edited an annual book series called
Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, an
international forum for the discussion of those questions. My book-length
studies are The Style of John Wyclif's English Sermons, Chaucer
and the Social Contest, and Time-Bound Words: Semantic and Social
Economies from Chaucer's England to Shakespeare's . I have also
written about Shakespeare, Jonson, Wycherley, and many contemporary
authors, critics, and filmmakers. I am currently working on a new
book called Chaucerian Aesthetics. My primary interest is in the relationship between "mass culture" and the "masses"---the dialectical relationship between our institutions of television, film, radio, and print culture and our social/political formations (Raymond Williams). While some scholars of mass culture continue to ridicule it, and others celebrate it, I am more interested in trying to explain it. I am also interested in the possibility that mass culture does not simply make us "passive consumers." My book on these questions, Radio-Active: Advertising and Activism 1935-1947, was published 2004. I also write a bi-weekly media column for The Pittsburgh City Paper. In addition, I am interested in theory, literature, visual art, and music. I have published articles on Civil War medical photographs, the image of the graduate student in popular culture, black radio stations in the South in the 1950s, and the challenges of being a junior professor ("Nice Work if We Can Keep It"). Forthcoming articles include a piece on MTV's Daria, a book chapter on radio critics of the 1930s, and an article for Minnesota Review on the working-class consumerism of True Story magazine in the 1950s. In addition, I am also a graphic artist and a union advocate. I research and teach in American culture and cultural theory. My special interests in American culture include film, popular music, and late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature. My theoretical interests concern the historical and institutional production of knowledge. I am the author of Michel Foucault and Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline, and Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis. I have co-edited Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, Making and Selling Culture, and Disciplining English. I am currently working on Classic Rockers: The Cultural Significance of the Stars and on a study of film director John Sayles. My interests are in feminist cultural studies, sexuality studies, and eighteenth-century British cultural studies. My book, Divided Fictions, was among a handful of feminist reconsiderations of the novelist Frances Burney that helped to change the assessment of that writer during the 1980s. Sexual Suspects, a book about actors and ideologies of sexuality in eighteenth-century Britain, has contributed to the recent growth in feminist cultural studies of the early modern period. I am currently writing a book on eighteenth-century London Servants. This project is helping me think through how labor, gender, and sexuality are integrally related in the practices and ideologies of London domestic service, in particular, and how we might think about the relation between these usually distinct categories in other historical instances. I am very grounded in classroom teaching; interactions with my students keep me intellectually alert, honest, and attuned to the importance of making "academic" issues matter to how we think about and live our lives. I have created a cultural studies edition of Burney's first novel, Evelina, for classroom use, as well as contributing to the Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, both of which grew out of my commitment to developing good texts for cultural studies classes. I teach courses in Gender Studies, Feminist Cultural Studies, and early modern British literature and culture. Why do we do what we do? This question draws
me most, in how the novel makes us readers, how theory and other
academic forms make us professionals, and how the university makes
twenty-first century citizens. Much of my writing covers these,
from Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British
Tradition (1998), The Institution of Literature (ed;
2002), and Critics
at Work: Interviews 1993-2003 (2004). I'm finishing two
books, one on Metatheory: Criticism and the University and
the other on Academic Feeling: The Senses of Professionalism.
I'm also an editor of the Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001)and have
been the editor of the literary and critical journal, the
minnesota review, since 1992. My early work focused on ways in which "spontaneity" served as a source of knowledge and rhetorical effects in the culture of the English Renaissance. Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, 2001) explores the ways in which narrative depictions of "accidental events" allowed them to serve as moments of discovery around the turn of the seventeenth century. My study of early modern child performers — Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cornell, 2007) — looks at how actions of children in civic pageantry, the plays of the children's theater companies, Shakespearean romance, and in cases of witchcraft and demon possession served as a touchstone for Renaissance debates about the nature of mimesis and imaginative absorption. In 2008, Continuum will publish Shakespearean Metaphysics, a study of Shakespeare's "dramaturgical monism" in three plays (King Lear, Twelfth Night, The Tempest) that takes as its reference points the philosophies of Spinoza, Bergson and Whitehead. I am organizer of the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. |
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