Emeritus Profiles

Belton, John

• 
• John Belton
• Title/Position: Professor of English
• belton@fas-english.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Cultural Studies; Film and Cinema Studies
• Bio: John Belton is Professor of English and Film at Rutgers University. He has a PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard (1975) and a BA in Greek and Latin from Columbia University. In 2005-2006, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to research a book on digital cinema. In 2008, he received and Academy Fellows grant to research a book on motion picture color. He is the author of five books, including Widescreen Cinema (1992), winner of the 1993 Kraszna Krausz prize for books on the moving image, and American Cinema/American Culture (1994), a textbook written to accompany the PBS series, American Cinema. He has edited three books, including the most recent book, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (2000). Professor Belton also edits a book series on film and culture for Columbia University Press (1989-on). He is a former member of the National Film Preservation Board (1989-96), and former Chair of the Archival Papers and Historical Committee of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (1985-96). He is also an associate editor of the film journal, Film History. His research interests include film technology, film aesthetics, culture and film, American film history, and classical film theory.
• Retired Since: 2020
• Education: PhD, Harvard University BA, Columbia University

Brown, Wesley

• 
• Wesley Brown
• Title/Position: Professor Emeritus of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1979
• wesley.brown@rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Nineteenth-century American literature; Modern drama
• Bio: Professor Brown is the author of the novels Darktown Strutters (2000) and Tragic Magic (1995). He has is also also the author of the play, "Boogie Woogie and Booker T," and "Life During Wartime," which was published inAction, an anthology of works from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Theater Festival (eds. Lois Griffith and Miguel Algarin, 1997). He co-edited the multicultural anthologies Visions of America (1991) and Imagining America (1993) and edited The Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass (1996).
• Retired Since: 2005
• Education: MA, City University of New York BA, The State University of New York (Oswego)

DeKoven, Marianne

• 
• Marianne DeKoven
• Title/Position: Professor Emerita of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1977
• marianne.dekoven@gmail.com
• Areas of Specialization: Gender and Sexuality; Modernist Literature; Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature
• Bio: Professor DeKoven is the author of Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (2004), Rich and Strange: Gender History, Modernism (1991), and A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (1983). She is also the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (2006), and of Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice (2001). She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on a range of topics, including modernism, postmodernism, gender, feminist theory, and twentieth-century fiction. She is currently working on a book project on gender, ethics, and animals in modern and postmodern fiction. Professor DeKoven is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, was the Principal Investigator for a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers, and is the recipient of the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Award for Excellence in Research.
• Retired Since: 2014
• Education: PhD, Stanford University MA, Stanford University BA, Radcliffe University

Dowling, William C.

• 
• William C. Dowling
• Title/Position: Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1989
• Areas of Specialization: Eighteenth Century English Literature; Nineteenth Century American Literature; Literary Theory
• Bio: Professor Dowling’s publications include: Ricoeur on Time and Narrative (2011), Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (2005), A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest (with Robert H. Bell) (2004), Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson (1999); The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory (1999); The Epistolary Moment: the Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (1991); Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (1990); Jameson/Althusser/Marx (1984); Language and Logos in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1981), The Boswellian Hero (1979), and The Critic’s Hornbook (1977). He is currently at work on a book entitled The Strange Death of Literary Boston: Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Lothrop Motley, and the American Civil War
• Retired Since: 2006
• Education: PhD, Harvard University MA, Harvard University BA, Dartmouth College

Ellis, Kate

• 
• Kate Ellis
• Title/Position: Associate Professor

Other Publications

• "Charlotte Smith's Subversive Gothic." 
  Feminist Studies 3.3/4, Spring - Summer, 1976. 51-55
• "Paradise Lost: The Limits of Domesticity in the Nineteenth-Century Novel."
  Feminist Studies 2. 2/3, 1975. 55-63
• "The Function of Northrop Frye at the Present Time." 
  College English 31.6, Mar., 1970. 541-547

Harriet Davidson

• 
• Harriet Davidson
• Title/Position: Associate Professor of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1984
• hardav@english.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Gender and Sexuality; Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature; Twentieth Century and Contemporary Poetry
• Bio: Professor Davidson is author of T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in "The Waste Land" (Louisiana State University Press, 1985), editor of the Longman Reader on T.S. Eliot (Longman Publishing Group, 1999), and the author of numerous articles on poetry, theory and feminism. She was Director of Women's Studies for six years, inaugurating in 2001 a new department and Ph.D. program in Women's and Gender Studies in 2001; and in 1997 she organized the Rutgers conference "Poetry and the Public Sphere." Her current work explores the cultural function of poetry, theories of witnessing, feminist aesthetic theories, and postmodernism.
• Retired Since: 2020
• Education: M.A., Vanderbilt University B.A., The University of Texas at Austin

Ian, Marcia

• 
• Marcia Ian
• Title/Position: Associate Professor Emerita of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1987
• gnudle@optonline.net
• Areas of Specialization: Nineteenth Century American Literature; Psychoanalysis
• Bio: Professor Ian is the author of Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism and the Fetish (1993). She is currently writing a book entitled American 'Secularity': The James Family and Others, which examines the writing of Henry James, Sr., William James, and Henry James in relation to America's mythic idea of itself as a "secular" nation. She is interested more generally in the intersections (and lack thereof) of psychoanalysis, philosophy and religion, and has published essays on these subjects as well as on Henry James and, in a not entirely unrelated development, certain aspects of popular culture, especially female bodybuilding.
• Retired Since: 2014
• Education: PhD, University of Virginia MA, University of Virginia BA, Wellesley College

Jacqueline T. Miller

• 
• Jacqueline T. Miller
• Title/Position: Associate Professor of English
• jamiller@english.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Early Modern Literature; Early Modern Poetry; Gender and Sexuality
• Bio: Professor Miller is the author of Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (1986). Recent publications include: “Ladies of the Oddest Passion: Early Modern Women and the Arts of Discretion” (Modern Philology, 2006); “Telling Tales: Locating Female Nurture and Narrative in The Faerie Queene” in Gender and Oral Traditions in Early Modern Literary Texts (eds. Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford, 2008); "The Passion Signified: The Construction of Emotions in Sidney and Wroth" (Criticism, 2001); "Lady Mary Wroth in the House of Busirane" in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (eds. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman, 2000); and "Mother Tongues: Language and Lactation in Early Modern Literature" (English Literary Renaissance, 1997).
• Retired Since: 2021
• Education: PhD, Johns Hopkins University MA, Johns Hopkins University BA, University of Rochester

Jehlen, Myra

• 
• Myra Jehlen
• Title/Position: Board of Governors Professor Emerita of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1985
• myrajehlen@gmail.com
• Areas of Specialization: Literature and Intellectual History; Nineteenth Century American Literature
• Bio: Professor Jehlen is the author of Readings at the Edge of Literature (2002), Class and Character in Faulkner's South (1976), American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (1989), and "The Literature of Colonization" in Volume I of The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 1, 1590-1820 (ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, 1994). She has also co-edited a number of volumes, including The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800 (1996), with Michael Warner. Her essays deal with American writing, comparative literature, and theoretical issues in literary interpretation and history.
• Retired Since: 2014
• Education: PhD, University of California, Berkeley BA, The City University of New York

John Kucich

• 
• John Kucich
• Title/Position: Distinguished Professor of English
• jkucich@english.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Victorian Literature Empire Studies Narrative Theory Psychoanalysis
• Bio: John Kucich is the author of four books on Victorian literature and culture: Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Georgia, 1981), Repression in Victorian Fiction (California, 1987), The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Cornell, 1994), and Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton, 2007). He has edited, with Dianne F. Sadoff, Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minnesota, 2000), and he is the editor of Fictions of Empire (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002). He also co-edited Volume Three, 1820-1880 (Oxford, 2011), in Oxford University Press's landmark project, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, a twelve-volume series that is likely to be the standard reference work for decades. He has written dozens of articles on Victorian literature and culture, which have appeared in the top journals in his field as well as in the most eminent generalist journals in literary studies. One of these, an essay on Rudyard Kipling, was awarded the 2005 Donald Gray Prize as the best essay of the year in Victorian studies by the field's flagship organization, the North American Victorian Studies Association. He serves on the advisory boards of several top journals in his field and has served on the Editorial Board of PMLA. He has won major fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. His areas of expertise include Victorian studies, empire studies, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and multi-media heritage adaptation.
• Retired Since: 2021
• Education: PhD, University at Buffalo MA, University at Buffalo BA, University of California, Santa Cruz

Koszarski, Richard

• 
• Richard Koszarski
• Title/Position: Professor of English
• rkoszars@english.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Film and Film Studies
• Bio: Professor Koszarski is editor-in-chief of Film History: an International Journal. He is the author of Hollywood on the Hudson Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff (2008); Fort Lee, The Film Town (2004); Von: The Life and Films of Erich Von Stroheim (2001); An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture (1994); and The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich von Stroheim and Hollywood (1983). In 1991, he was awarded the Prix Jean Mitry by the Giornate del Cinema Muto "for safeguarding and apprising the cinematographic patrimony." Professor Koszarski's research interests include the history of the American film industry, cinema and museology, and the development of television. He is currently writing a history of filmmaking in New York and New Jersey.
• Retired Since: 2020
• Education: PhD, New York University MA, New York University BA, Hofstra University

Awards, Affiliations, Distinctions and Fellowships

• Bergen County Historic Preservation Award for Fort Lee, The Film Town, 2005
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2003
• Prix Jean Mitry, Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1991
• Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1923, 1991
• National Film Book Award for The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich von Stroheim and Hollywood, 1984
• American Council of Learned Societies, Research grant, 1978

Other Publications

• "Nancy Naumburg: Vassar Revolutionary" 
  Film History: An International Journal 18, 2006
• "'It's No Use to Have an Unhappy Man': Paul Fejos at Universal"
  Film History: An International Journal 17, 2005
  
• "Flu season: Moving Pictured World reports on pandemic influenza, 1918-19" 
  Film History: An International Journal 17, 2005

Kusch, Robert

• 
• Robert Kusch
• Title/Position: Professor Emeritus of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1970
• rkusch@rci.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Modernist Literature; Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature; Twentieth Century and Contemporary Poetry; Victorian Literature
• Bio: Professor Kusch's publications include The Field: Poems (2003) and My Toughest Mentor (1999).
• Retired Since: 2011
• Education: PhD, Northwestern University MA, Northwestern University BA, Valparaiso University

Levine, George

• 
• George Levine
• Title/Position: Professor Emeritus of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1968
• georgelevine@gmail.com
• Areas of Specialization: Victorian literature; literature and science
• Bio: Professor Levine has released the following publications: Dying to Know (2002); The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2001); Darwin and the Novelists (1988); The Realistic Imagination (1981); and Lifebirds (1997). He also wrote introduction and notes for The Origin of the Species (2004). He works in aesthetics, nineteenth-century literature and culture, the relations between literature and science, and problems connected with the condition of the profession. He is at work on a new study, "The Uses of Darwin," and "How to Read the Victorian Novel." He was Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture.
• Retired Since: 2006
• Education: PhD, Minnesota University MA, Minnesota University BA, New York University

McClure, John A.

• 
• John A. McClure
• Title/Position: Professor Emeritus of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1975
• jmcclure@rci.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Literature and Religion; Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature
• Bio: Professor McClure is the author of Late Imperial Romance (1994) and Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (1982), as well as essays on colonial and postcolonial discourse and geopolitics. His latest book is Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007).
• Retired Since: 2014
• Education: PhD, Stanford University MA, Stanford University BA, Tufts University

Michael McKeon

• 
• Michael McKeon
• Title/Position: Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of English
• mimckeon@english.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• Bio: Michael McKeon specializes in the history of literary and cultural forms. His approach to history takes in both the chronological or diachronic dimension of forms and their structural or synchronic relations to other formations—political, social, economic, cultural--with which they coexist at their respective diachronic moments. Within this broad methodological field, McKeon’s attention is concentrated on England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. McKeon has taught and written on a range of topics, among them the aesthetic, realism, disinterestedness, genre theory, narrative theory, parody, allegory and typology, romance and the novel, family romance, the picaresque, pastoral and pastoralism, sensibility, travel narratives, status and class, sex and gender, domestication and domesticity, pornography, patriarchalism, secularization, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, from feudalism to capitalism, periodization, the division of knowledge, science and literature, civil and religious liberty, the public and the private, the public sphere, libel and censorship, Marxism and literature, dialectical method, politics and poetry, tradition, print culture, virtual reality.
• Retired Since: 2021
• Education: PhD, Columbia University MA, Columbia University BA, University of Chicago

Ostriker, Alicia S.

• 
• Alicia S. Ostriker
• Title/Position: Professor Emerita of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1965
• ostriker@rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Poetry; Feminism; Religion Eighteenth-century; Romantic poetry
• Bio: Ostriker's critical publications include Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic (2000); The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1997); and Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1987). Her poetry collections include The Book of Seventy (2009), a National Jewish Book Award winner; The Volcano Sequence (2002); Green Age (1989); The Little Space, Poems Selected and New,  which was nominated for a National Book Award (1998);The Crack in Everything, which won the Paterson Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award and was nominated for the National Book Award (1996); The Imaginary Lover (1986), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; and The Mother/Child Papers (1986).  Professor Ostriker was active in Women's Studies and the Center for the Study of Jewish Life.
• Retired Since: 2004
• Education: PhD, University of Wisconsin MA, University of Wisconsin BA, Brandeis University

Poirier, Richard

• 
• Richard Poirier
• Title/Position: Professor Emeritus of English At Rutgers
• At Rutgers Since: 1963
• Areas of Specialization: Critical and Literary Theory; Cultural Studies
• Bio: Professor Emeritus Richard Poirier is the author of Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other PerformancesThe Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (1992), and Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977). He was a Professor of Literature for Rutgers University and Chair of the English Department (1963). He was founder of the literary journal Raritan: A Quarterly Review, and the Library of America. But some agree that his most important contribution came in his criticism, which tried to convey why the act of reading is — and should be — so difficult. (1999),
• Retired Since: 2002
• Education: PhD, Harvard University MA, Yale University BA, Amherst College

Qualls, Barry V.

• 
• Barry V. Qualls
• Title/Position: Vice President of Undergraduate Education and Professor Emeritus of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1971
• bqualls@scarletmail.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Literature and Religion; Literature and the Other Arts; Victorian Literature; Victorian Poetry
• Bio: Professor Qualls is the author of The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life (1982), and of articles and reviews on 19th-century English literature and on the Bible and its literary impact. Currently, he is Vice President for Undergraduate Education at Rutgers. In the past he has served as Chair of the English Department, Director of the English Graduate Program, and Dean of Humanities in the School of Arts and Sciences. His particular focus as a member of the Rutgers community has been the ways graduate and undergraduate education should work together constructively in a research university. In 2004-05, he chaired the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, a group of faculty, staff, and students appointed by Rutgers President Richard L. McCormick to examine thoroughly and then reorganize undergraduate education at Rutgers' New Brunswick/Piscataway campus. Professor 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.
• Retired Since: 2016
• Education: PhD, Northwestern University MA, Northwestern University BA, Florida State University

Sadoff, Dianne F.

• 
• Dianne F. Sadoff
• Title/Position: Professor Emerita of English
• At Rutgers Since: 2006
• sadoffdf@rci.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Film and Cinema Studies; Victorian Literature
• Bio: "I’m the type of life-long learner who likes to learn a new discourse for every project. I take pride in my ability to teach students the pleasures and skills of interdisciplinarity. My students learn to apply the discourses of political science and history to the study of fiction and the tools of gender studies, psychoanalysis, and the history of feminism’s emergence to the study of women writers. In my film and literature classes, I teach students to read film through the lens of aesthetic, visual-culture, and historical analysis and to understand the difference that media makes to the study of narrative structure and situation. By teaching my students in an interdisciplinary way, I hope to inspire them to become life-long learners too. "
• Retired Since: 2016
• Education: PhD, University of Rochester MA, Oregon State University BA, Oberlin College

Curriculum Vitae

Other Publications

• “Charles Dickens”
  (co-edited with John Kucich) The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (ed. Nancy Armstrong, 2006)
• “‘Appeals to Incalculability’: Sex, Costume Drama, and The Golden Bowl”
  Henry James Review 23, 2002
• “‘Hallucinations of Intimacy’: The Henry James Movies”
  Henry James at the Movies (2002)
• “Histories of the Present”
  Victorian Afterlife: Contemporary Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (co-edited with John Kucich, 2000)
• “‘Intimate Disarray’: The Henry James Movies”
  Henry James Review 19.3, Fall 1998
• "The Father, Castration, and Female Fantasy in Jane Eyre"
  Jane Eyre: A Casebook (ed. Beth Newman, 1996)
• "'Experiments Made By Nature': Mapping the Nineteenth-Century Hysterical Body" 
  Victorian Newsletter 81, Spring l992
• "Looking at Tess: The Female Figure in Two Narrative Media"
  The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Thomas Hardy (ed. Margaret Higgonet, 1992)
• "Romola: Trauma, Memory, and Repression"
  George Eliot (ed. K.M. Newton 1992)

Awards and DistinctionsProfessional Memberships and Affiliations

• Visiting Scholar, Department of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2002-3
• Visiting Scholar, Beatrice Bain Research Group, University of California, Berkeley, l991-2
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1990-1
• Editorial Board, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2007-
• Editorial Board, Atlantis, 2005-

Other Information of Interest

• "Dianne F. Sadoff" - New Faculty Profile
  by Carolyn Williams (Future Traditions Magazine, Issue 1)

Smith, Carol H.

• 
• Carol H. Smith
• Title/Position: Professor Emerita of English
• At Rutgers Since: 1959
• chs@rci.rutgers.edu
• Areas of Specialization: Women's literature; Modernism
• Bio: Professor Smith is the author of T.S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice (1976), as well as many essays on 20th century writing and questions of gender. Her current research centers on the modernist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), including H.D.'s work on film in the 1930s and her use of ideas and methods from psychoanalysis. Professor Smith was also active in Women's Studies.
• Retired Since: 2007
• Education: PhD, Michigan University MA, Michigan University BA, Ohio Wesleyan University

Articles

• "Review of The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe's Fiction"
  American Literature 70.3, September 1998
• "Review of The Men of 1914"
  American Literature 62.2, June 1990