David Kurnick
Assistant Professor
Nineteenth Century

David Kurnick is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in Victorian and Modernist literature, the history of the novel, drama and performance theory, and gender and sexuality studies. He received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. A specialist in Victorian literature and Anglo-American modernism, his research interests include the history of the novel, theories of reading, and the cultures of sexual minorities. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in English Literary History, The Henry James Review, and Victorian Studies. His dissertation, entitled “The Vocation of Failure: Frustrated Dramatists and the Novel,” was a study of the theatrical ambition of major novelists, including William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, and James Joyce. In 2006-2007, he was a fellow at the Columbia Society of Fellows, expanding his dissertation into a project that looks more broadly at the psychological novel’s relation to the public energies represented by the theater. He will also be continuing work on a project that considers the ways the ways the novel as a form thinks about the related issues of sexual promiscuity, the rhythms of urban life, and the condition of novel-reading itself. He has taught for Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and for the English departments at Barnard College and UCLA.

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Henry S. Turner
Associate Professor
Renaissance

Henry S. Turner is an Associate Professor of English specializing in early modern literature and culture and in twentieth century critical theory. He comes to Rutgers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught from 2000 to 2007. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University, an MA in Renaissance Studies and Critical Theory from the University of Sussex, an MA, MPhil and PhD from Columbia University, and a Diplôme Supérieur d'Études Françaises from the Université de Bourgogne.

Professor Turner has just completed a book entitled Shakespeare’s Double Helix, which is forthcoming in December 2007 from Continuum Press. He is also the author of a book on Renaissance drama, practical knowledge, and the history of scientific thought entitled The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford University Press, 2006). He is the editor of The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002), and his articles have appeared or are forthcoming in ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Twentieth Century Literature, and The History of Cartography (University of Chicago Press). He is a contributor to The Norton Anthology of Drama (forthcoming 2007) and is co-editor of the book series Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Ashgate Press).

He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whiting Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Wisconsin-Vilas Foundation, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 2005 he was named one of twelve “most brilliant Renaissance scholars in the world under 40” by a committee of scholars chaired by Gary Taylor and affiliated with the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, University of Alabama and the Renaissance program at Florida State University, on the basis of scholarly work "that pushes the boundaries of the discipline in new directions.”

Professor Turner serves on the executive committee of the Center for Cultural Analyis and directs the Program in Early Modern Studies (PEMS). He is organizing a conference at Rutgers this fall on the topic “Historicisms and Its Discontents.” Scheduled for Friday, October 12, 2007, the conference will feature plenary lectures by L. O. Aranye Frandenburg (University of California, Santa Barbara), Jean Howard (Columbia University), Madhavi Menon (American University), and Kathryn Schwarz (Vanderbilt University).

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Rebecca L. Walkowitz is an Associate Professor of English, whose areas of research include the twentieth- and twenty-first-century British, Irish, and Anglophone novel; modernism; cosmopolitanism; the new world literature; the history of the book; and narrative theory. She received her AB in American history and literature from Harvard University in 1992, an MPhil in English literature and critical theory from the University of Sussex in 1995, and an MA and PhD in English and American literature from Harvard in 1997 and 2000.

Professor Walkowitz’s recent publications include a book about aesthetic and political strains of cosmopolitanism in the writing of twentieth-century British and postcolonial novelists, entitled Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (Columbia University Press, 2006), and a volume of essays about the new modernist studies, co-edited with Douglas Mao, entitled Bad Modernisms (Duke University Press, 2006). She is the co-editor of five other books, including The Turn to Ethics (Routledge, 2000), Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America (Routledge, 1995), and Media Spectacles (Routledge, 1993), and her articles have appeared in journals such as ELH, MLQ, Modern Drama, and Contemporary Literature, and in several anthologies. Professor Walkowitz is an Associate Editor of Contemporary Literature and a member of the executive committee of the MLA Division on Twentieth-Century English Literature. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Whiting Foundation, the Institute for the Humanities at UW-Madison, the University of Wisconsin Vilas Foundation, the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, and the U.S. Department of Education.

At Rutgers, Professor Walkowitz serves on the executive committee of the Center for Cultural Analysis. She is the organizer of a seminar series on Modernism and Globalization. The group will host its first seminar on Thursday, November 15, 2007, with guest speakers Eric Hayot (Penn State University) and Pericles Lewis (Yale University).

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Lynn Festa will join the faculty at Rutgers as an Associate Professor of English in January 2008. She received her B.A. from Yale University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and co-editor of the forthcoming The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Post-Colonial Theory (Oxford University Press, 2008). Her articles have appeared in the journals Eighteenth-Century Life, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, as well as the anthology The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton University Press, 2001).

She is currently working on two projects: The Personality of Things in Eighteenth-Century Britain, which addresses how eighteenth-century representations of circulating goods and bodies unsettle the boundaries between subjects and objects, persons and things in eighteenth-century Britain; and The Properties of Empire: Nation, Race, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, which offers a comparative literary and cultural history of the elaboration of Enlightenment categories of human classification.

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