Christopher P. Iannini, Assistant Professor

Christopher P. Iannini received his Ph.D. 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 (April 2004).  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.

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Gregory S. 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,” appeared in last year's 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 Ph.D. in English and American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and served on the faculty in English at the University of Arizona. He was an American Council of Learned Socieities (ACLS)-Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow (2004-05), and while at the University of Arizona, received the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

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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).  “Sadomasochism and the Magical Group,” a chapter from his recently published book, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton, 2007), 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 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.

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Carter A. Mathes, Assistant Professor

Carter A. Mathes is a specialist in African American literature and African diaspora literature.  He received his Ph.D. 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 participated 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” 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.

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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.

Louise Barnett

Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women

Oxford University Press, 2007

Jonathan Swift was the subject of gossip and criticism in his own time concerning his relations with women and his representations of them in his writings.  For over twenty years he regarded Esther Johnson, "Stella," as "his most valuable friend," yet he is reputed never to have seen her alone.  From his time to our own there has been speculation that the two were secretly married--since their relationship seemed so inexplicable then and now...

Matthew S. Buckley

"Tragedy Walks the Streets" : The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006

Tragedy Walks the Streets challenges the conventional understanding that the evolution of European drama effectively came to a halt during France’s Revolutionary era.  In this interdisciplinary history on the emergence of modern drama in European culture, Professor Matthew S. Buckley contends that the political theatricality of the Revolution tested and forced the evolution of dramatic forms, supplanting the theater itself as the primary stage of formal development...

William C. Dowling
Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris:

Medicine, Theology, and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
University Press of New England, 2006

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s Breakfast Table Trilogy was a series of extremely popular essays published in The Atlantic Monthly from its first issue in 1857 to 1870.  Speaking to the cultural and religious concerns of the period, these essays made Holmes famous on both sides of the Atlantic.  Professor William C. Dowling brings together literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science...

Colin Jager

The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006

The Book of God is a penetrating study of the argument from design as it emerged and circulated in the romantic era.  This argument holds that the intricacy and complexity of the natural world points to a divine designer and that nature is to be read as God’s book. A literary and philosophical study of this idea, The Book of God revisits the familiar equation of romanticism, modernity, and secularization.  Professor Colin Jager eschews classic formulations of the thesis that societies secularize as they modernize, arguing instead that secularization is complexly interwoven with modernity rather than simply opposed to it...

John Kucich

Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class

Princeton University Press, 2006

British imperialism's favorite literary narrative might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests also generated a surprising cultural obsession with suffering, sacrifice, defeat, and melancholia.  "There was," writes Professor John Kucich, "seemingly a different crucifixion scene marking the historical gateway to each colonial theater."

Evie Shockley

a half-red sea

Carolina Wren Press, 2006

In a half-red sea, Evie Shockley is ‘dreaming the lives of the ancestors.’  Navigating against prevailing currents, these poems sail on eddy and backflow, taking inspiration from knots and twists of American history and culture.  Whether improvising between the lines of a slave narrative in ‘henry bibb considers love and livery,’ amplifying Lady Day’s most devastating blues in ‘you can say that again, billie,’ or going freestyle with ‘double bop for ntozake shange,’ Shockley’s imagination travels every which away...

Matthew S. Buckley, Associate Professor

Matthew S. Buckley's article, "‘A Dream of Murder’: The Fall of Robespierre and the Tragic Imagination," published in the Winter 2005 issue of Studies in Romanticism, received the 2007 Award for Best Essay in the Area of the Godwin Circle and Later British Romanticism by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.

Michael McKeon, Professor

Michael McKeon's The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge was selected as a Winner by the Association of American Publishers' Professional and Scholarly Publishing Awards in Communication and Cultural Studies.

Richard E. Miller, Professor

Richard E. Miller’s Writing at the End of the World won the 2006 James N. Britton Award.  Administered by the National Council of Teachers of English, the Britton Award encourages English language teacher development, by promoting reflective inquiry in which teachers raise questions about teaching and learning in their own teaching/learning settings.

Cheryl A. Wall, Professor

Cheryl A. Wall’s Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition was nominated by the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation for a 2006 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.  The book was also identified as a 2006 Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and a 2005 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Faculty Awards, Fellowships, and Distinctions

Kate Flint, Professor of English

Kate Flint was named a Fellow of the National Humanities Center for the academic year 2007-08. She was also awarded the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research for 2006-07.

Barry V. Qualls, Professor of English and Interim Vice President for Undergraduate Education

Barry V. Qualls was named the 2006 New Jersey Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support Education (CASE).

  
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Friends of Rutgers English Newsletter Profile: english.rutgers.edu/alumni/newsletter/ss06

Evie Shockley, Assistant Professor of English

Cheryl  A. Wall, Professor of English

Cheryl A. Wall was named Board of Governors Professor of English in December 2006. This April, she was awarded a Rutgers University Human Dignity Award by the Office of the President and the Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes for her commitment to promoting the value and importance of diversity at Rutgers and in society.