Faculty Profiles

Lauren M. E. Goodlad is  Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, editor of Critical AI and chair of the Critical AI @ Rutgers as well as a faculty affiliate of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), the Rutgers British Studies Center, and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. At Rutgers, she has served as Associate Chair of English and as a member of the executive committee for Graduate Studies; and a board member for RBSC. She is currently a member of the AI Advisory Council and CASS (Cyberinfrastructure for Science, Engineering, & Society). Her grants in the emerging interdisciplinary field of critical AI studies and the teaching of critical AI literacies include an NEH international grant ("Unboxing AI') to create workshops and other programming in collaboration with partners at the Australian National University, DESIGN JUSTICE AI (a Global Humaniites Institute at the University of Pretoria in July 2024), DESIGN JUSTICE LABS (an NEH grant for the creation of a shared digital infrastructure for student- and community-centered teaching about and research on "generative AI"), and new NSF planning grant (in collaboration with lead-PI Matthew Stone) to research and explore design-oriented thinking in the terrain of teaching College Writing.

At the University of Illinois, where she taught until 2017, Goodlad was Kathryn Paul Professorial Scholar, University Scholar, Provost Fellow for Undergraduate Education, and director of the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory (2008-14).

Goodlad's work in critical AI studies and the teaching of critical AI literacies, includes the editor's introduction to Critical AI, "Humanities in the Loop"; the introduction to DATA WORLDS (co-authored with Katherine Bode); and "Now the Humanities Can Disrupt 'AI'" (co-authored with Sam Baker). She is the co-editor with Matthew Stone (Computer Science) of the forthcoming two-part special issue of Critical AI on Large Language Models, Generative AI, and the Rise of Chatbots (the first part of which is due out in September 2024). A "sneak preview" of the co-edited introductions (in the form of a copy-edited MS) can be downloaded from this link. 

As a specialist in Victorian and nineteenth-century literature and culture, Goodlad has research and teaching interests in genre studies; critical, feminist, postcolonial, and political theory; television and seriality studies; literature in relation to liberalism, globalization, and financialization; and critical AI studies. She has served as the chair of the MLA's TC History and Literature forum and a member of the advisory boards for Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and Victoriographies. 

Goodlad's current book project, which works at the intersecction of nineteenth-century and critical AI studies, is tentatively titled Genres that Matter: The Ontological Work of Nineteeneth-Century Fiction. A longue duree study of groundbreaking Victorian-era media including Wuthering Heights, Trollope's Barchester Chronicles, and the creation of Sherlock Holmes. By way of exploring genre conventions as they migrate and morph across periods, media, and geographic borders, the book describes such varied afterechoes as David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, HBO's Big Love, and the advent of data-driven artificial intelligence in late-Victorian-era detective fiction. Excerpts from the study have appeared in New Literary History, Re-Plotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, and The Wide Nineteenth Century (a recent special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture). Goodlad co-edited What Is and Isn't Changing, a December 2020 special issue of MLQ and has a second project under development on the topic of the country house and the world-system. Parts of the project were adapted for "Said and the 'Worlding' of Nineteenth-Century Fiction," her contribution to After Said (ed. Bashir Abu-Manneh).

Goodlad is the author of The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty and Transnational Experience (Oxford, 2015, 2016) and Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Johns Hopkins, 2003) as well as the editor or co-editor of two collections and several special issues: Worlding Realisms, a 2016 special issue of Novel; Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke UP, 2013); The Ends of History, a 2013 special issue of Victorian Studies; Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke, 2007); States of Welfare, a 2011 special issue of Occasion; Comparative Human Rights, a 2010 special issue of the Journal of Human Rights; and Victorian Internationalisms, a 2007 special issue of RaVoN. Her work has also appeared in American Literary History, Cultural Critique, ELH, Genre, Literature Compass, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and PMLA. Some of her discussions on the topic of liberalism, from the nineteenth century to the present day, have appeared in Victorian Studies, The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, The Blackwell Companion to the Novel, Victorians Institute Journal, and in "Liberalism and Literature," and essay commissioned for The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Literary Culture.

Goodlad's first essay on Mad Men, originally titled "Madmen Yourself," appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009 and was reprinted in The McGraw Hill Reader. In addition to the book she co-edited with Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert Rushing, she was the editor of a series of blogs on the show's later seasons and published "It's the Real Thing," her take on the show's 2015 finale, in Public Books. Among other work on serialization and serial telelvision, she has written a keyword on "Seriality" and the afterword to Television for Victorianists (a 2013 special issue of RaVoN), while serving as a juror for the International Emmy Awards' Peter Ustinov Prize for Television Scriptwriting. 

Maurice Wallace Professor of English at Rutgers University, New-Brunswick. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (which earned him an MLA William Scarborough Prize) and King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr., both published by Duke Univ. Press. He is co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity and has written a short biography of Langston Hughes for junior high and high school students, published by Marshal-Cavendish Publishers. He has written a number of scholarly articles ranging topically from the nineteenth-century religious roots of African American literature to early and modern photography, race and disability, and Black oratory. He is the recent recipient of the Rutgers Presidential Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award.

Maurice is presently at work on a monograph he calls Black Trees, a meditation on race, ecology, and tree life in the US.

"In the classroom, I aim for an interdisciplinary line of inquiry that allows historical knowledge and cultural theory to inform close textual analysis. My general goal is to create a setting in which students passionately, critically, and respectfully participate in the collaborative production of knowledge. I work to establish an environment of high expectation and high engagement with black cultural production, so that students take the subject matter and themselves seriously, while always remaining open to the element of intellectual surprise. As a result, participants in a course—myself included—tend become stronger thinkers and writers with a genuine sense of accomplishment."

Professor Novacich specializes in medieval literature. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, drama and performance cultures, gender studies, archival theory, visual culture, fiction, and travel literature. She has essays on these subjects in an array of journals, including Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, JEGP, postmedieval, and Philological Quarterly. Her first book, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance (Cambridge UP) examines how episodes of sacred history – in particular, the loss of Eden, the flood, and the Harrowing of Hell – illuminate the risks and pleasures of archival process. Her current research examines the cultural uses of rhyme in Middle English poetry. She is the Director of the Program in Global Medieval Studies at Rutgers.