Faculty Profiles

• 
• Tina Lupton
• Professor of English

Professor Lupton's distinguished scholarship brings the rigor and historical depth of 18th-century literary studies to bear on contemporary media theory, establishing the history of reading as an indispensable framework for current work in media studies.

Professor Lupton is the author of several monographs and editor of numerous scholarly collections. Her award-winning first book, Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), examines how 18th-century British authors employed metafictional techniques to foreground the materiality and technological dimensions of the book as object. Reading and the Making of Time in the Age of British Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) challenges contemporary assumptions about distracted reading by demonstrating that 18th-century readers navigated similar temporal constraints, advancing an argument about reading's capacity to constitute temporality through non-linear practices. Her co-authored Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford University Press, 2022), awarded the 2022 British Association for Contemporary Literature Monograph Prize, employs sociological methodologies to investigate reading practices during lockdown, illuminating how encounters with reading technologies shape literary interpretation.

Professor Lupton has edited several volumes, including the Oxford World's Classics edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and journal special issues including "Latour and the Eighteenth Century" for The Eighteenth Century. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her creative nonfiction work, Love and the Novel: Life After Reading (2022), received wide critical acclaim.

A scholar of exceptional range, Professor Lupton brings expertise in 18th-century literary studies, contemporary reading practices, book history, media theory, and literary sociology to the department.

• 
• Heather Love
• Distinguished Professor of English

A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of numerous awards, Heather stands at the vanguard of contemporary literary and cultural studies. Her wide-ranging scholarship encompasses queer theory and gender studies, 20th and 21st century literature and culture, affect theory, disability studies, performance theory, and visual/media studies. Her work bridges literature and sociology and engages deeply with questions of critical methodology.

Heather is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has edited several pathbreaking journal special issues. Her landmark 2007 book, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, remains central to ongoing conversations about emotion and politics in queer studies. Her most recent book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021), has generated a major-and widely remarked upon-disciplinary rapprochement between sociology and literary studies, one with which scholars across fields continue to grapple. Heather is currently at work on To Be Real: The Uses of the Personal in Queer Criticism, under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

• 
• Naomi Extra
• Assistant Professor
• Primary Areas of Specialization: Black Feminisms, Gender and Sexuality, Black Sexual Politics, Black Women’s Cultural Production.
• Field of Interest: African-American & Diaspora, Gender & Sexuality, Poetry & Poetics, Twenty-first Century
• About:

  I am a poet, writer, cartoonist, and scholar. In both my creative and scholarly work, I explore the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of black women and girls. My current book project, tentatively titled Bad Black Feminism: A Long History of Black Women Writers and Sex-Positivity, focuses on black women writers of the twentieth century who have been construed as problematic or inconvenient to mainstream black feminism. My research/creative work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the African American Intellectual History Society. In addition to my academic engagements, I am committed to public facing work. I have published poetry, comics, and essays in Boston Review, Zora, Glamour, Lit Hub, Washington Post’s The Lily, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. I am the founder of the Black Women in Jazz Oral History Project, a project that seeks to redefine how we think about community, labor, and artistic production in jazz.

• 
• Jeehyun Choi
• Assistant Professor
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• Primary Areas of Specialization: Asian American and Asian diaspora literatures; transnational Asian American studies; global Asias; critical Korean studies; translation studies
• Field of Interest: Asian-American, Critical Race Studies, Postcolonial, Translation, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century
• About:

  Jeehyun* Choi studies and teaches Asian American and diasporic literatures, with particular interest in transpacific cultural productions that engage the history of multiple imperialisms in Asia. Her current book project examines the political commitments of Korean American/diasporic writers who produce new modalities of anti-imperial resistance in transnational contexts. Her work pivots around newly discovered and forgotten texts written in Korean and English, arguing that a translingual understanding of Asian American literature forces us to reconsider enduring narratives of Asian diasporic history. Jeehyun approaches translation as an opportunity to discover the rich social histories that have shaped Korean diasporic imagination. Before coming to Rutgers, she was a Korea Foundation-Korea Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

  * pronounced Jee-hyuhn, rhyming with “sun”

• Education: PhD, University of California, Berkeley; M.St., University of Oxford; BA, Brown University