Jonathan Loesberg
Professor and Department Chair
PhD, Cornell University
E-mail: jloesbe@american.edu
Professor Loesberg has written three books, Fictions of Consciousness: Mill, Newman and the Reading of Victorian Prose; Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and De Man; and A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism. He is also the author of numerous articles on Victorian literature, the novel, literary theory, and the connections between literature and philosophy.

Janet Gebhart Auten
Director, Writing Center
PhD, Bowling Green University
Janet Gebhart Auten directs the Writing Center and teaches the graduate Teaching Composition sequence. She holds an MA from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a PhD in Rhetoric/ Composition and American Lit. from Bowling Green State University. Professor Auten taught in the College Writing Program for nine years and won a CAS teaching award. Her published articles concern the rhetoric of antebellum American women writers and rhetorical analysis of teachers’ responses to student writing. Her current project introduces a dialogic approach to teacher response.

Amanda Berry
Assistant Professor
PhD, Duke University
E-mail: aberry@american.edu
Professor Berry teaches courses in British literature including the Romantic period. She also teaches courses in literary criticism including gender and sexuality studies. Her research and published work consider the relationship between literary texts, history, and other cultural phenomena. She has published articles on Edmund Burke’s ideas about British social order, human difference, and the sublime and Percy Shelley’s representation of intimate relationships between men as a crucial aspect of his endeavors to write drama. She is currently at work on a book entitled Rough Publick: Romanticism, Sexuality, and Writing, which considers Romantic responses to the advent of a thriving, complex public sphere in Britain.

Erik Dussere
Assistant Professor
E-mail: dussere@american.edu
Professor Dussere's teaching and research are primarily focused on the literature, film, and culture of twentieth-century America, although he is also interested in topics such as French film, the postcolonial novel, and cultural studies. His first book, Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery, was published in 2003. He has also published articles about comic books and strips, and is currently writing about film noir and detective fiction.

Despina Kakoudaki
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of California at Berkeley
E-mail: kakoudak@american.edu
Professor Kakoudaki teaches interdisciplinary courses in literature and film, visual culture, and the history of technology and new media. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her current book project, The Human Machine: A Cultural History of Artificial People, which traces the history and cultural function of constructed people and animated objects. She has co-edited a new collection of essays on the work of Pedro Almodóvar (with Brad Epps, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press), and published articles on robots and cyborgs, race and melodrama in action and disaster films, body transformation and technology in early film, the political role of the pin-up in World War II, and the representation of the archive in postmodern fiction. Kakoudaki joins the faculty from Harvard University where she taught courses in Film Studies and Comparative Literature. Her interests include cultural studies, silent cinema, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and the representation of race and gender in literature and film.

David Keplinger
Associate Professor
MFA, Penn State University
E-mail: keplinge@american.edu
David Keplinger's The Prayers of Others appeared in 2006 from New Issues press. It was called by The Antioch Review  "The Inferno reconfigured as a cross between one of Joseph Cornell's boxes and a Rube Goldberg drawing: an infernal machine designed to produce the uncomfortable pleasures of wit's disjunctions, gallows humor, wry nostalgias." In 2005 Keplinger's second book, The Clearing, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Anna Akhmatova Prize for Excellence in Writing. He won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his first collection, The Rose Inside (1999), and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2007 a work in translation from the Danish will appear: World Cut out with Crooked Scissors: The Selected Poems of Carsten Rene Nielsen. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Poetry, and elsewhere.

Charles R. Larson  
Professor
PhD, Indiana University
E-mail: clarson@american.edu
Professor Larson is the author of works of literary criticism and fiction. His critical works include The Emergence of African Fiction, American Indian Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and a biography, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. His novels include The Insect Colony, Arthur Dimmesdale, and a collection of satirical sketches called Academia Nuts. He recently edited Under African Skies: Modern African Stories. He received the University Faculty Award for Outstanding Teacher in 1991.

Keith Leonard
Associate Professor
PhD, Stanford University
E-mail: kdl@american.edu
Professor Leonard's interests include nineteenth and twentieth century American and African American literature, the development of twentieth century African American poetry, the Harlem Renaissance, American modernist poetry and poetics, and the legacy of the Blacks Arts Movement and Black Nationalism for contemporary African American literature. He has recently finished a book titled Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights about the history of African American poetry up to the late 1960s, focusing on the African American poet's traditional poetic artistry as a mode of political agency. The book is forthcoming in the spring of 2006. Prof Leonard has also published on the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Michael Harper. He is currently working on a book-length study of ideals of introspection and political consciousness in contemporary African American poetry and in hip hop culture.

Richard McCann
Professor, MFA Program in Creative Writing
PhD, University of Iowa
E-mail: rmccann@american.edu
Professor McCann is the author, most recently, of Mother of Sorrows (Vintage, 2006), a collection of linked stories that Michael Cunningham has described as "almost unbearably beautiful."  He is also the author of Ghost Letters (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1994 Capricorn Poetry Award), a collection of poems, and the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing:  More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the Aids Pandemic.  His worked has appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Esquire, Ms., and Tin House, and in numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and Best American Essays 2000.  For his work, he has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.  McCann, who was named the 2005 AU Scholar-Teacher of the Year, serves on the Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Work Center and the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.  For more information, please visit his website:  www.RichardMcCann.net

Madhavi Menon
Assistant Professor
PhD, Tufts University
E-mail: menon@american.edu
Professor Menon is interested in the theoretical parameters within which we study desire, specifically, the ways in which we study the sexual desires and proclivities of the English Renaissance. Her first book, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (University of Toronto Press, 2004), explores rhetoric as a desirable mode for reading the past in which the workings of language embody the frisson of desire. Her new book, Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (Palgrave, 2008) extends that interest in rhetoric to a consideration of historicism as a mode of literary inquiry into sexuality. Unhistorical Shakespeare explores the tension between methodological ideas of sameness (homo) and difference (hetero) within which we situate historicist thinking about sexuality. Currently, Professor Menon is also at work on editing a volume called Shakesqueer, which will feature essays by queer theorists on every one of Shakespeare’s poems and plays. She teaches classes on queer theory, Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, Renaissance drama, and literary theory.

Jeffrey Middents
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Michigan (Comparative Literature)
E-mail: middents@american.edu
Professor Middents studies and teaches film and world literature, specifically focusing on Latin American narratives from the 1960s to the 1980s. He teaches a variety of film courses (national cinema, genre courses on the musical and horror) as well as a cultural studies seminar. Professor Middents' current research project examines the impact and influence of the Peruvian film journal Hablemos de cine on the development of national cinema in that country from 1965 to 1984.

Kay Mussell
Professor and Dean of College of Arts and Sciences
PhD, University of Iowa
E-mail: mussell@american.edu
Professor Mussell is the author of Women's Gothic and Romantic Fiction: A Reference Guide and Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women's Romance Fiction . She co-edited Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity and has published articles and reviews on American fiction and culture. In 1986, she received the University Faculty Award for Academic Development in recognition of her work as Faculty Director of College Writing and Director of the University Honors Program.

Marianne K. Noble
Associate Professor
PhD, Columbia University
E-mail: mnoble@american.edu
Professor Noble's teaching and research interests include American literature, culture studies, and gender studies, with a particular emphasis on the construction of sexuality in nineteenth-century American women's literature. She is the author of The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton UP 2000), which won a Choice Outstanding Book Award. She has recently published articles on gothic and sentimental literature and is currently working on a book entitled Sympathy and the Quest for Genuine Human Contact in American Romanticism.

Deborah Payne-Fisk
Associate Professor
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
E-mail: dfisk@american.edu
Professor Fisk teaches in the Theatre Program at AU, as well as in Literature.  An expert on theatre history, she has written extensively on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama and performance.  In 2005, Professor Fisk published Four Restoration Libertine Plays (Oxford UP); additionally, she has edited The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (Cambridge, 2000) and, with J. Douglas Canfield, Cultural Readings in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theatre (Georgia, 1995).  Currently she is at work on two projects, a textbook, A History of World Theatre, and a critical monograph, Patronage, Print, and Performance: The Restoration Dramatist in the Marketplace, 1668-1700.  Professor Fisk has been awarded numerous fellowships, including grants from the Folger, Huntington, and Clark Libraries; in 2002, she won, in conjunction with The Shakespeare Theatre, a three-year Exemplary Project Grant from the NEH entitled "Theatre History Initiative."  In addition to teaching and scholarship, Professor Fisk does directing and dramaturgy; currently, she is the Humanities Research Consultant at The Shakespeare Theatre Company.

David Pike
Associate Professor
PhD, Columbia University
E-mail: dpike@american.edu
Professor Pike is the author of Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800 – 2001 (Cornell UP, 2007); Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London 1800-1945 (Cornell UP), which was shortlisted for the 2006 Modernist Studies Association book prize Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (Cornell UP), which received the 1997 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1997; and articles on medieval literature, modernism, film, and Paris and London. He is co-editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004). In addition to the urban underground, he teaches courses on European and Canadian cinema, modernism, Dante, Roman literature, and the novel. From 1993 to 1995, Professor Pike was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University; he has also received grants from the NEH, the ACLS, and the Government of Canada.

Roberta Rubenstein
Professor
PhD, University of London
E-mail: rubenst@american.edu
Professor Rubenstein's primary teaching interests include Modernist fiction, literature by Modernist and contemporary women writers, and feminist literary theory. She has published more than thirty articles and book chapters, as well as three books: The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979), Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (1987), and Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction (2001). She has co-edited, with her husband, AU Professor Charles R. Larson, an anthology of short stories, Worlds of Fiction (1993; 2nd ed. 2001). At American University, she has been honored with several awards for teaching and scholarship, including the College of Arts and Sciences Award for Outstanding Teaching (twice) and its Senior Scholar Award. She was named the university's Scholar/Teacher of the Year in 1994.

Richard Sha
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Texas, Austin
E-mail: rcsha@american.edu
Professor Sha teaches courses in nineteenth-century literature and culture. His The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He has also edited two volumes on Romanticism and the History of Sexuality, one for Romantic Praxis in 2006 and one for Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (2001). The former includes essays by David M. Halperin and Andrew Elfenbein. In 2003 and again in 2006, Prof. Sha was invited by the National Library of Medicine to give a seminar in its History of Medicine Colloquium. Together with Caleen Sinette Jennings, he designed and implemented the new ethnic studies minor at AU. He won the Teaching Excellence Award for General Education in 2002.   In 2004, the American University Undergraduate Student Confederation bestowed upon him their teaching award.  Professor Sha’s forthcoming book, Perverse Romanticism, is a study of aesthetics and its relation to sexuality in Britain from 1760 to 1832 (Johns Hopkins University Press, December 2008). He is currently at work on a book on science and the imagination during the British Romantic period, for which he has received a grant from the American Philosophical Society.

Anita Gilman Sherman
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Maryland
E-mail: asherm@american.edu

Professor Sherman's most recent publication, Skepticism and Memory in Shakespeare and Donne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), explores the impact of skepticism on the development of modern memory. She has published articles on Garcilaso de la Vega, Thomas Heywood, Montaigne, John Donne, and The Merchant of Venice. Professor Sherman studies and teaches Renaissance and Western World literature and currently offers courses on Shakespeare and transformations of Shakespeare.

Marcela Sulak
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
MFA, University of Notre Dame
E-mail: sulak@american.edu
Professor Sulak teaches courses in contemporary world poetry, modern American poetry and translation, and she is an affiliate member of the Jewish Studies Program. Her translations include Karel Hynek Macha’s poem "May "from the Czech by Twisted Spoon Press in 2005, and the Congolese Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha’s book-length poetry collection, Bela-Wenda, currently under reivew. She is working on a book entitled 1920s New York as a Construction Site for Modernist “American” Poetry. Her poetry chapbook, entitled, Of All the Things that Don’t Exist, I Love You Best, is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press. Other poems have appeared in such journals as Fence, Indiana Review, River Styx, The Notre Dame Review, and Quarterly West.

Linda Voris
Visiting Assistant Professor
PhD, UC Berkeley
E-mail: voris@american.edu
Professor Voris’s teaching and research interests include twentieth-century American and British literature, the intellectual history of modernism and its relation to the visual arts, as well as contemporary lyrical and experimental poetry.  Her book manuscript, The Force of Landscape:  Gertrude Stein’s Writing in the Early Twenties, is presently under review.  In addition to articles on Stein, she has published on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in American Women Poets in the 21st Century, and presented on contemporary experimental poets.  Her poetry chapbook, AntiGraphi, won the 2003 Providence Athenaeum award, and her poems have appeared in Volt, Germ and online at New Media Poets.

Michael Wenthe
Assistant Professor
MPhil, University of Oxford; PhD, Yale University
E-mail: wenthe@american.edu
Michael Wenthe was trained in medieval literature at Duke, Harvard, Oxford, and Yale.  His primary research interest involves the staging of othering and difference as expressed in the polyglot, international literature of King Arthur, and his current book project has the working title Arthurian Outsiders: The Dynamic of Difference in the Matter of Britain. He has presented several conference papers on medieval literature (and on comics and graphic novels, another abiding interest), and his publications include pieces on writers from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Izaak Walton to John Gardner and Ben Katchor.

Olga E. Rojer, PhD
Associate Professor
BA, Mount Holyoke College
PhD, University of Maryland
E-mail: orojer@american.edu
Professor Rojer studied German intellectual history and literature and obtained her PhD at the University of Maryland in 1985. Her early research focuses on the marginalized literature of the German speaking exile in Latin America. She is the author of Exile in Argentina: 1933-1945 (Peter Lang, 1989). Her recent research has emphasized the subaltern literature of the Caribbean creole language Papiamentu and post colonial literature in Dutch. Rojer received a Pushcart Prize nomination for her work on the fiction of celebrated Dutch Caribbean author Boeli van Leeuwen. Rojer is also an award winning screenwriter. Her teaching interests include modern German literature and film and literary translation.

Kermit W. Moyer
PhD, Northwestern University
E-mail: kmoyer@american.edu
Professor Moyer is the author of Tumbling (University of Illinois Press), a collection of short stories . His poetry and short fiction have appeared in such periodicals as The Georgia Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Crescent Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Hudson Review. He is also the author of critical articles on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the films of Robert Altman. His primary teaching interests, besides creative writing, are modern and contemporary American fiction. He is a recipient of the university's Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award. Since 1996, he has been a frequent panelist on the monthly "Readers Review" feature of the nationally syndicated radio program, The Diane Rehm Show.

Myra Sklarew
Professor
BS biology, Tufts University; MA The Writing Seminar, The Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: msklarew@american.edu
Myra Sklarew, former president of the artist community Yaddo and currently professor of literature at American University, is the author of three chapbooks; six collections of poetry, most recently Lithuania: New & Selected Poems and The Witness Trees; a collection of short fictions, Like a Field Riddled by Ants; and a collection of essays, Over the Rooftops of Time. Her poetry has been recorded for the Contemporary Poets' Archives of the Library of Congress. A nonfiction work entitled Holocaust and the Construction of Memory is scheduled for publication by Syracuse University Press in the future. She was educated at Tufts University where she studied biology, at the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory, where she worked with Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck studying bacterial genetics and bacterial viruses, and with Elliott Coleman in the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University. She has worked in the Department of Neurophysiology at Yale University School of Medicine where she studied frontal lobe function and delayed response memory in Rhesus monkeys. Myra Sklarew's claim to fame was working in a dance band on Long Island in the late 1940s as a pianist where she earned seven dollars a night. She began her work at American University in 1970. Her first students included those returning from the Vietnam War.