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Rhetoric

Courses

Marian Aguiar <aguiar@andrew.cmu.edu>
Associate Professor
(412) 268-3714

Dr. Marian Aguiar’s research focuses on the different forms of modernity that appear in the global context. Her forthcoming book Tracking Modernity: India, Trains, and the Culture of Mobility (University of Minnesota, 2010) explores cultural representations of the modern by considering the imagination of railway space in colonial, nationalist and postcolonial South Asian contexts. Her current project looks at arranged marriage in South Asia and its diaspora in the EU and the United States. Professor Aguiar has taught on such topics as postcolonial studies, South Asian literature and film, South Asians in the diaspora, and culture and globalization. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, and Rethinking Marxism, as well as in edited book collections.
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Alan Kennedy <ak2w+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English
(412) 268-7175

I have worked on modern and Victorian fiction, theories of fiction, and post-structural and cultural theory in general. I am interested in problems of understanding and interpretation in cross-cultural contexts. I have been working recently on issues of curriculum reform in the humanities, and the politics of both literary interpretation and the institutionalizing of literary and cultural studies.
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Jon Klancher <jonklancher@cmu.edu>
Associate Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies
(412) 268-2852

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.
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Peggy Knapp <pk07+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English
(412) 268-6453

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.
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Kathy M. Newman <kn4+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Associate Professor of English
(412) 268-6450

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.
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Richard Purcell <rpurcell@andrew.cmu.edu>
Assistant Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies

My primary field of study is late nineteenth and twentieth century African-American literature and literary criticism. I have secondary interests in film studies, American intellectual history and popular
culture with a particular focus on Hip-Hop. Teaching wise, I have offered courses on the role of the “vernacular” in American literary history and criticism as well as a course looking at minstrelsy in American popular culture from T.S. Eliot to Little Brother. You can find some of my work in Critical Quarterly or on the radio as a commentator for National Public Radio. My specific intellectual interest is studying what Antonio Gramsci called "cultural hegemony." To that end, my current book project explores the relationship intellectuals and artists in particular people of color, women and “exiles” in the US – had to the American state after World War II. I argue that these groups
contributed to a new, more globally informed humanism that simultaneously shows the role of the American state in the production of humanistic knowledge during the Cold War.
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David R. Shumway <shumway@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies
(412) 268-7176

I research and teach in American culture and cultural theory. My special interests in American culture include film, popular music, and late nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. My theoretical interests concern the historical and institutional production of knowledge, cultural politics, and theories of identity. 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 have just competed American Idols: Seven Rock Stars as Cultural Icons, and I am nearly finished with a study of film director John Sayles. My next project will concern realism across media in the U. S. during the 20th century.
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Kristina Straub <ks3t+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Associate Professor of English and Associate Head
(412) 268-6458

My interests are in feminist cultural studies, sexuality studies, and eighteenth-century British cultural studies. My first 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, helped to direct theater and feminist studies of the early modern period toward a now-burgeoning interest in performance and its cultural contexts, particularly how sexuality is imagined in popular culture. Domestics Affairs, a new book on the relationships between masters and servants in 18th century Britain, will be out in Spring of 2009 from Johns Hopkins University Press. This book explores 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.
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Jeffrey Williams <jwill@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies
412-268-1977

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.
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