Marian Aguiar <aguiar@andrew.cmu.edu>
Assistant Professor, Literary & Cultural Studies
(412) 268-3714

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.
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Jane Bernstein <janebern+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor
(412) 268-6445

When I joined the writing program here in 1991, I thought of myself as a fiction writer. In the years since them, I’ve found myself drawn to other
genres. My new book, Rachel in the World, is a memoir, as were the two books that preceded it. I’ve published essays in such places as Ms., Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, The New York Times Magazine, Self, and Creative Nonfiction and written several scripts, among them the screenplay for Seven Minutes in Heaven, a Warner Brothers film. Works in progress include essays and a novel. Among my honors are two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Fiction, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, one in fiction and one in Media Arts, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Creative Writing, and a Fulbright Fellowship in 2004 to teach creative writing at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. I have an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and have been a member of the Creative Writing Program here at CMU since 1991.

For more information, check my website www.janebernstein.net.
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Claudia Carlos <ccarlos@andrew.cmu.edu >
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric
(412) 268-6214

My research interests focus on the history of rhetoric, with special emphasis on the connection between argumentation and style, the rhetoric of indirection, and seventeenth-century European rhetoric. I am currently preparing a book manuscript that explores the argumentative potential of stylistic figures and their relation to an "art of safe criticism." As a case study, I use six sermons by the seventeenth-century French preacher, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704). Given in 1662 during Lent, the sermons offer a provocative critique not only of Louis XIV's social policies toward the poor, but also of the king's own moral excesses. This work has also led to two other projects. The first concerns the post-revolutionary French reception of Bossuet's sermons and the second examines the "style as argument" question by considering examples not only from Bossuet's prose but also that of more contemporary writers, such as Edward Said. Finally, I am also fascinated by how style functions rhetorically in prose fiction. In 2003, my article on Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's novel, Madame Gervaisais, appeared in the French journal, Les cahiers naturalistes.
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Gerald Costanzo <gc3d@andrew.cmu.edu >
Professor of English
(412) 268-2861

Carnegie Mellon University Press, which I founded in 1975, publishes twenty books each year in the fields of poetry, short fiction, memoir, history, art history, education, and business.   Perhaps the Press' most notable book has been Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah which in 1987 received The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.   Commencing in the year 2000, three of the past five Pulitzer winners in poetry either began their careers with or were sustained by Carnegie Mellon University Press. I teach courses in the writing and history of poetry. I have published seven collections of poems and edited four anthologies. For twenty years I was editor of Three Rivers Poetry Journal. My first collection, Badlands, was also the first book published by the noted publisher of poetry, Copper Canyon Press. Two new books, Regular Haunts: New and Selected Poems, and Spiderman for Life: The Collected Poems of James W. Hall (edited with an introduction by Gerald Costanzo) are forthcoming. My work has been honored with two Fellowships in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as by fellowships from the Falk Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. It has also received two Pushcart Prizes.
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Jim Daniels <jd6s@andrew.cmu.edu>
Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English
(412) 268-2842
writing sample

Jim Daniels won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize for his book, Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies (Eastern Washington University Press, 2007). Two other books were published in 2007, his third collection of short fiction, Mr. Pleasant (Michigan State University Press), and his eleventh book of poems, In Line for the Exterminator (Wayne State University Press). In 2005, Jim Daniels wrote and produced the independent film “Dumpster,” and Street, a book of his poems accompanying the photographs of Charlee Brodsky, won the Tillie Olsen Prize from the Working-Class Studies Association. In addition, he has edited or co-edited four anthologies, including Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He has received the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the Thomas Stockman Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Creative Writing Program. At Carnegie Mellon, he has received the Ryan Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Teaching and Educational Service.
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David Demarest <dd0l+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Associate Professor of English (Emeritus)
(412) 268-2852

I am interested in a variety of subjects that have to do with labor/industry/workplace politics and the ways these subjects have been and are represented. My teaching includes such topics as journalism, working-class literature, reading of the built landscape (in which, through photos and field trips, we look at how social and work places, public and private space, have changed/are changing), interviewing (which looks at a number of structures built from electronic interviews, in film, video, and literature). Overall I'm interested in publications designed for general audiences. One recent project was The River Ran Red, an anthology commemorating the Homestead Strike of 1892, built from journalistic accounts by a collective of about a dozen people, including academics, filmmakers, unionists, journalists, etc.
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Sharon Dilworth <sd20@andrew.cmu.edu >
Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing
(412) 268-6446
writing sample

As an artist in mid-career my creative work in fiction explores the tragedies and resonances of middle age. In each of my three latest novels I have attempted to discern the timbre and qualities that have emerged in my own adult life by creating characters whose desires are circumscribed by the landscapes and pasts they can no longer escape. I think my latest writing is more resonant emotionally than my earlier work. It deals more with ambiguity and paradox and attempts to capture the sadness and grace notes of everyday life. The three novels I've written in the past five years explore new emotional complexities from different vantage points. In My Riviera a young woman confronts the challenges of adult relationships while her family is in self-imposed exile in the south of France. In The Cousin in the Backyard , the protagonist is forced to analyze her upbringing and the untidy debris behind middle-class appearances. Finally The Man on the Street examines the adulterous fantasies of an unhappy woman who sees few options for her future. I have been writing or thinking of things to write ever since my 9th birthday when I bought a red journal with its own lock and key. I assumed I would record the wildly exciting moments of my life. My interest in journal writing never developed. Instead I filled the blank pages with my imagination. I have been making up stories about people who don't exist for almost forty years. In the context of developing interdisciplinary links across campus as well as giving students the opportunity to acquire valuable hands-on experience I have helped developed a new course on campus with the College of Fine Arts' School of Drama, the Tepper School of Business and the Entertainment Technology Center "So You Want to Make A Movie." In a year-long course, students, working in production teams will write, shoot, direct, edit, and market their own feature-length film.
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Linda Flower <lf54@andrew.cmu.edu >
Professor of English and Rhetoric, Co-Director of Center for University Outreach
(412) 268-2863
home page

Cognitive rhetoric is a new area of rhetorical research that invites curiosity about the ways people actually construct meaning as they read and write. As a cognitive rhetorician I am interested in the thinking process writers go through as they read a situation, plan, write, and revise and in the different problem-solving strategies experienced and developing writers use. In Reading-to-Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process we showed the radically different ways CMU freshmen represented a supposedly standard academic task to themselves. In The Construction of Negotiated Meaning I sketch a theory of how writers interpret and negotiate the forces and voices that shape writing. And at the Community Literacy Center my students and I are trying to turn this theory into practice.
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Yona Harvey <yharvey@andrew.cmu.edu>
Instructor, Creative Writing
(412) 268-9156

My experiences in archives and information science, as a writer in the schools, and as a collaborator with other artists all inform my work as an emerging poet. Expanding the ways in which poetry is written and read interests me most. I like to borrow from many schools of poetry, especially those that challenge the more widely accepted (or perhaps familiar) mode of linear narrative—though I love a good story. Using non-poetry texts to read and compose poetry is also of interest to me at home and in the classroom. Such texts include, but are not limited to, The Poetics of Space, The Not So Big House, The Design of Everyday Things, music reviews, fashion magazines, old grammar primers, and even cookbooks. I am constantly searching for new audio archives and rare recordings in poetry, which are becoming more accessible on The Internet. Most recently, I’ve been experimenting with flash fiction and personal essay. In addition to Pushcart nominations, my work has received a Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council grant and a Barbara Deming Award. Recordings and texts of some of my poems are housed at the outstanding Fishouse Audio Archive.
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Terrance Hayes <thayes@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of Creative Writing
(412) 268-9195
writing sample

I am the author of Hip Logic (Penguin 2002) and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999; Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Classics, 2005) and have been the recipient of many honors and awards including a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series award, a Pushcart Prize, a Best American Poetry selection, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Wind in a Box, my third book is forthcoming from Penguin in the spring of 2006. If my poetry is a reflection of any particular "thing," I hope it reflects my receptiveness. The way a mirror reflects receptiveness, I mean. Hence reading, inventive imitation and wild exploration are at the root of my poetic process. I am a happy apprentice to the contents of your local bookshelf. There are recurring explorations of race, heritage and masculinity (I'm mostly interested in the intersections of identity and culture), and rather than deny my thematic obsessions, I work to change the forms in which I voice them: baritone here, tenor there, soprano, alto... That's to say, I aspire to a kind of fluid, mutant style. A poetic style that resists style. Maybe my most recent collection reflects this. Ultimately I'm interested in a Whitmanesque notion of poetry. A poetry open-armed and dangerous. A poetry that says as Whitman said: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
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Paul Hopper <hopper@cmu.edu>
Professor of English and Linguistics and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
(412) 268-7174
home page

My research and teaching have been centered on the connections between rhetoric (discourse) and grammar (linguistic structure). I am interested in working out the implications of an idea first broached by me in 1988, that structure is not immanent in a language but "emerges" through repetitions of favored word groupings in discourse. Along these lines, I wrote, with the Stanford linguist Elizabeth Traugott, a book, Grammaticalization (Cambridge 1993), that describes the typical historical sources and trajectories of the forms that make up the grammar of a language. Some of my work involves a critique of the standard assumptions of linguistics from the perspective of rhetoric. I'm fascinated by structural differences among languages and the search for "the essential" in language, and this interest has led me into a variety of projects, from comparative Indo-European and the Malayo-Polynesian languages to discourse analysis to the study of human-ape communication. I have published articles and written and edited books on Indo-European and Germanic philology and on Malay discourse. I have been editor of the journal Language Sciences, and have served on the executive committees of the MLA's Language Theory section and of the Linguistic Society of America. I've been the Collitz Professor at the LSA's Linguistics Institute, and have been a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.
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Suguru Ishizaki <suguru@cmu.edu>
Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Design
(412) 268-4103

My research focuses on developing tools for communication design. My work in the past several years has addressed problems and opportunities associated with the design of digital communication media. In my book, Improvisational Design: Continuous Responsive Digital Communication (MIT Press, 2003), I proposed a descriptive model of design--along with a series of computational experiments--that would allow designers to represent design solutions that are responsive to dynamic changes in the information recipient's intention, in the situation, and in the information. I also explored Kinetic Typography--a study of how different situated meanings of written text emerge by expressing the text using animated forms. Recently, I have begun to work on developing a theoretical framework that would allow us to analyze how surface visual design decisions relate to rhetorical effects. I have also been collaborating with David Kaufer on rhetorical text analysis. In this project, I have been developing computational tools for analyzing rhetorical effects through surface patterns of English. The results of this collaboration have been published in Power of Words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer's Hidden Craft (Erlbaum, 2004), co-authored with David Kaufer, Jeff Collins, and Brian Butler. I am also a practicing interaction and visual designer.
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Barbara Johnstone <bj4+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics
(412) 268-6447
home page

My work is in an area that might be called "discourse studies," at the intersection of rhetoric, linguistics, and critical theory. I have worked on persuasive styles and strategies in the Middle East, on narrative in the American heartland, on the forms and functions of repetition in language, and on the role of the individual in language and linguistics. I am interested in how the relationships between individuals and communities are created and maintained through discourse (talk and writing) and discourses (ways of thinking). My current work is about how the way of talking popularly known as "Pittsburghese" is constructed through local talk, and talk about local talk. I want to see how people's understandings of language and place are connected with language change in this part of the North Midland dialect area, and I am interested in how local-sounding speech functions as a rhetorical resource. I use, and teach others about, qualitative, interpretive research methods such as ethnography and discourse analysis.
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David S. Kaufer <kaufer+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English and Rhetoric and Department Head
(412) 268-2850
home page

My interests are in qualitative and quantitative theories of rhetoric, writing and written information. In addition to heading the Carnegie Mellon English department, I co-chair an interdisciplinary masters program between English and the School of Design in the College of Fine Arts. For the past decade, I have been interested in investigating rhetoric as an art of design and this research interest has dove-tailed well with my administrative interest in co-directing a program between English and the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. My research interests have led to theoretical (Kaufer & Butler, 1996) and more practical books (Kaufer & Butler, 2000) relating rhetoric and design. My recent work has involved collaborating on software interfaces that allow researchers and students to analyze texts visually for their locally patterns of rhetorical design. I am currently working on a book (with Suguru Ishizaki and Jeff Collins, along with Brian Butler), that associates multi-word English patterns with rhetorical effects. This book explains the rhetorical/language theory behind the visualization software. I am developing new courses in rhetorical analysis and World Englishes.
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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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Hilary Masters <hm05+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English and Creative Writing
(412) 268-6443
home page | writing sample

My working experiences as a journalist, a Broadway press agent, and even some history in politics, have all found a place in my writing. My work sounds themes of abandonment--different kinds of abandonment, physical, spiritual and moral--while it tries to represent men and women caught in the socio-political fabric of America. From my first novel (The Common Pasture, 1967) racial injustice has been a consistent referral as well as questions of gender. So, eight novels, two collections of short stories, a biographical memoir and, most recently, a collection of personal essays, In Montaigne's Tower. In May of 2005 U. of Pittsburgh Press will publish my book length essay, "Shadows on a Wall", an account and recreation of the 1940 meeting between the Mexican muralist Juan O'Gorman and E.J. Kaufmann, the Pittsburgh "merchant prince" who built Fallingwater. In 2004, my family memoir Last Stands: Notes from Memory was republished by SMU Press with an introduction by Phillip Lopate and an afterword by myself. My new novel Elegy for Sam Emerson will be published by SMU press in 2005, and my essays and short stories have been included in the different Best of the Year anthologies. My work has also received The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
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Jane McCafferty <janem@andrew.cmu.edu>
Associate Professor of Creative Writing
(412) 268-7177
writing sample

I have been primarily a fiction writer for most of my adult life, but find myself leaning toward non-fiction and very short prose pieces now. I've really enjoyed working with the photographer Charlee Brodsky, responding to her photos as a prose writer and poet. I'm interested in the relationship between the verbal and visual, and that's what I get to explore working with Charlee. I'm currently contributing to her project on images of mental illness in our culture, along with her project on Homestead. I'm also at the very beginning of field research for a book I want to write on a very unusual family in Pittsburgh and their experiences with several adoptions. I teach a variety of fiction and non-fiction courses. My favorite of these is Literary Journalism; I'm always awed by what many students are able to produce in this genre. I'm teaching a new course called The Literature of Mysticism, where we look at the tradition of mystical writing in all the world religions. I'm the author of three books, Director of the World and other stories, which won the Drue Heinz prize, One Heart, a novel, and Thank You For the Music, a second book of stories. Over the course of three years I wrote a second novel and ended up thinking it was a failure. This may have something to do with why I'm currently leaning toward non-fiction.
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Chris Neuwirth <cmn+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English and Human Computer Interaction
(412) 268-8702
home page
My research activities have focused on developing theory- and research-based computer tools for reading and writing, as well as conducting empirical research that explores the effects of those tools. The tools allow us to test hypotheses about how external representations can augment writers' performances. I've also focused on arguments of policy and on collaborative writing.
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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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Andreea Deciu Ritivoi <aritivoi@andrew.cmu.edu>
Associate Professor of English and Rhetoric

My research interests are in several fields, such as rhetorical theory, rhetoric of science, intellectual history, and intercultural communication. I've tried to bring them all together in a book, Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Construction of Personal Identity, which was published in 2002 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. My concern in this book is to understand how individuals develop a sense of who they are by creating narratives about themselves and others. I am now working on a book coming out with SUNY Press on modern rhetorical theory with emphasis on Paul Ricouer's contribution to rhetorical studies, especially concerning issues like representation and figuration. I teach professional writing and the rhetoric of science.
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Karen Rossi Schnakenberg <krs+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Teaching Professor of Rhetoric and Writing
(412) 268-2659
home page

My interests center around the history of writing instruction and English Departments, curriculum design, and the teaching of writing. In research, I'm particularly interested in how learning to write is conceptualized, how such conceptions influence writing pedagogy, and the relationship between theory and practice in writing instruction. I also have a long-standing interest in methods for communicating specialized information to non-expert audiences. In curriculum development, I'm developing a situation-based method for teaching technical and professional writing. Administratively, I direct our undergraduate and MA programs in technical and professional writing.
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David R. Shumway <shumway@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies
(412) 268-7176
CSA home page

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.
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Erwin R. Steinberg <es2t+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of English and Rhetoric (Emeritus)
(412) 268-2866
home page

My teaching and research concern the various uses of language in reading and writing. In literature, I teach and write about how meaning is derived from and assigned to novels of the early twentieth century--particularly those by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. In rhetoric and composition, I am especially interested in writing in business, industry, and government. As a teacher and a student of writing, I am more of a practitioner than a theoretician. I do a good bit of writing, and I serve as a communication consultant in business, industry and government. Those experiences enable me to write about how to solve practical writing problems and to bring such problems into the classroom.
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Kristina Straub <ks3t+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
(412) 268-6458

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.
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Danielle Zawodny Wetzel <dfz@andrew.cmu.edu>
Director, First-Year English Program
Lecturer in Rhetoric and English
412-268-4468
First Year English

I’m interested in all things related to the teaching and assessment of reading and writing—especially at the intersection of rhetoric, applied linguistics, and composition. As the director of the First-Year English Program, my responsibilities range from training and mentoring new PhD student teachers, to instructing our ESL first-year students, to maintaining a working relationship with our English faculty and staff at our branch campus in Doha, Qatar.
More specifically, I am working on designing more curriculum options for
students who are nonnative English speakers and are considered to be
“proficient” in English. Alongside that challenge, I am developing training
materials for First-Year English teachers to incorporate linguistic
heterogeneity into their personal pedagogies.
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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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Michael Witmore <mwitmore@andrew.cmu.edu>
Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
(412) 268-4215

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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