New Faculty

The Department of English is pleased to welcome the 5 new faculty members who arrived for the Fall 2006 semester:

Christopher P. Iannini, Assistant Professor

Christopher P. Iannini received his PhD in English in 2004 from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he was also awarded the Alumni and Faculty Prize for Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year. From 2004 to 2006, he held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His article “‘The Itinerant Man’: Crèvecoeur’s Caribbean, Raynal’s Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism” appeared in William and Mary Quarterly. Another article on William Bartram and the natural history of colonial Florida appeared in Mississippi Quarterly. Both pieces are adapted from his current book manuscript, entitled Fatal Revolutions: Caribbean Natural History, Atlantic Slavery, and the Routes of Early American Literature. In the study, he pursues the complex Caribbean routes of American nature discourse from the consumer revolution of the mid eighteenth century, through the Americanization phase in lower Louisiana, and through antebellum debates over the annexation of Cuba.

Profile: english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/iannini.html

Greg Jackson, Assistant Professor

Greg Jackson is a specialist in Early American and nineteenth-century literature and religious culture. He is the author of articles that have been published in such venues as Representations, American Literary History, and The Blackwell Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America. His recent article “‘What Would Jesus Do?’: Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel,” just appeared in PMLA (May 2006). Adapted from a chapter in his forthcoming book, American Pilgrim: Protestant Experience and the Progress of Narrative, the essay makes the historical case for an unrecognized literary genre by suggesting an alternative origin for American literary realism. He received his PhD in English and American Studies from UCLA, and served on the faculty in English at the University of Arizona. He was an ACLS-Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow (2004-05), and while at the University of Arizona, received the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Profile: english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/jackson.html

John Kucich, Professor

John Kucich is a specialist in Victorian literature and culture. He is the author of The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Cornell, 1994), Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens ( California, 1987), and Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens ( Georgia, 1981). His new book, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in January 2007; a chapter from that work, “Sadomasochism and the Magical Group,” was awarded the 2005 Donald Gray Prize for the Best Essay in Victorian Studies by the North American Victorian Studies Association. He co-edited, with Dianne F. Sadoff, the collection Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century ( Minnesota, 2000), and a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts on the topic “Postmodern Victorians” (2000). He has also edited Fictions of Empire (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), a literary anthology that brings together three short fictional works written in the late 1880s and 1890s—by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson—which center on the topic of British imperialism. A professor at the University of Michigan from 1979 until joining Rutgers English in 2006, he has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. He has served on the advisory board of the journals Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Studies, and currently serves on the advisory board of the North American Victorian Studies Association.

Profile: english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/kucich.html

Carter A. Mathes, Assistant Professor

Carter A. Mathes is a specialist in African American literature and African diaspora literature. He received his PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006. From 2003 to 2006, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University, where he participated in the seminar “The Atlantic and Global War,” sponsored by the Institute for Critical United States Studies. This academic year, he is participating as a fellow in the working group “Cultures of Circulation” at the Center for Cultural Analysis. He has worked on a number of projects, including making available for scholarly inquiry the papers of Ted Joans, a well-known jazz and Black Arts Movement poet, as well as co-organizing the conference, “‘Don’t Say Goodbye to the Pork Pie Hat’: Re-evaluating Larry Neal’s Creative and Critical Vision of the Black Aesthetic,” which will take place this fall at Brooklyn College. He is currently working on a book manuscript, Imagine the Sound: Modalities of Radical Struggle in Post-Civil Rights Era Black Literature.” In this work, he examines the creative use of sound in black literature as a form of both aesthetic innovation and political resistance during the shifting racial climate of the 1960s to 1980s.

Profile: english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/mathes.html

Dianne F. Sadoff, Professor

Dianne F. Sadoff specializes in Victorian studies, cultural studies, and film studies. The author of Sciences of the Flesh: Representing Body and Subject in Psychoanalysis (Stanford, 1998) and Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood (Johns Hopkins, 1982), she is currently completing a book project entitled Victorian Vogue: The Nineteenth-Century British Novel on Screen. She co-edited, with William E. Cain, Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates (MLA, 1994), and, with John Kucich, the collection Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minnesota, 2000) and a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts on the topic “Postmodern Victorians” (2000). A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Ford Foundation, she has been a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught regularly on the faculty at the Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, Vermont. Prior to joining Rutgers English, she was professor and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Miami University of Ohio.

Profile: english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/sadoff.html