English Graduate Faculty
The English Department Graduate Faculty is a large and diverse group of field nominated faculty with competence in a wide range of literary, theoretical, and cultural fields. Graduate faculty share an interest in graduate education and recognize the special responsibilities involved in the direction of graduate students. Members may serve as chair or minor subject member of any special committee in any subject of which they represent.
The Department of English maintains strong ties with Cornell programs in Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Latino Studies, Native American Studies, Visual Culture, and Women’s Studies. In addition to the distinguished graduate faculty in such related departments as Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, German Studies, History, Philosophy, Theatre Arts, and Classics, members of the English faculty, listed below, are available to direct graduate work and to serve on Special Committees:
Faculty A-Z
- James Eli Adams
- Nineteenth-century British literature and culture; interdisciplinary study of Victorian Britain; gender and sexuality; non-fictional prose
- Fredric Bogel
- Eighteenth-century English literature; satire; English and American poetry; critical theory; rhetoric and writing
- Mary Pat Brady
- U.S. Latino and Latina literatures and cultures; cultural studies; American multi-ethnic literatures
- Laura Brown
- Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature, especially matters of generic history, ideology, and form. Feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, cultural critique
- Cynthia Chase
- Romanticism, theory, psychoanalysis; romantic and modern poetry; women’s literature; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel
- Eric Cheyfitz
- American literatures; federal Indian law
- Walter Cohen
- Renaissance literature; history of European literature; Marxist criticism and theory
- Barbara Correll
- Renaissance cultural texts; gender, post-structualist theory; film; cultural studies; lesbian, bisexual, and gay literary studies
- Jonathan Culler
- Literary theory and history of modern literary criticism; English poetry since 1600; nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature
- Debra Fried
- Nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry. History of the lyric. Linguistic approaches to poetry. Poetic form, prosody and interpretation. Linguistic approaches to the novel. American film.
- Alice Fulton
- The reading and writing of poetry; short fiction; critical writing; postmodernism; 20th century American poetry; feminist theory; Emily Dickinson; poetics and science.
- Ellen Gainor
- British and American dramatic literature, especially nineteenth through twenty-first centuries; women’s dramaturgy and feminist theatre criticism; performance and dramatic theory; modernism and theatre; cultural history.
- Andrew Galloway
- Old and Middle English (at present especially Chaucer, Langland, and Gower); medieval history writing; intellectual communities and the sociology of knowledge; visions of women and women’s writings; paleography and codicology.
- Roger Gilbert
- Twentieth-century American poetry; British and American Romantic poetry; American literature; Shakespeare; Milton; literary evaluation
- Ellis Hanson
- Victorian literature; decadence and aestheticism; gender studies; lesbian and gay studies; psychoanalysis; and film.
- W. Lamar Herrin
- Twentieth-century Southern fiction; contemporary American fiction; story and novel writing
- Thomas Hill
- Old English, Middle English, Old Norse-Icelandic, Old French. Though primarily interested in literature, has served on committees of students interested in linguistics on occasion
- Molly Hite
- Twentieth-century fiction; literature by women, especially experimental narratives; feminist criticism and theory; modernism, postmodernism, and alternative constructions of the twentieth-century literary history (including challenges to existing canons); fiction writing
- Phyllis Janowitz
- Poetry writing and reading, especially that of the twentieth century; twentieth-century American fiction; women and literature; and the artist in literature
- Rayna Kalas
- 16th- and 17th-century poetry and prose; poetics and technology; visual studies; the labor and craft of writing in the early modern period
- J. Robert Lennon
- Creative writing; contemporary literature; crime and science fiction novels
- Philip Lorenz
- Renaissance drama, political theology, sovereignty, poetics and theory, literature and philosophy
- Alison Lurie
- Creative writing; the novel; children’s literature; folklore
- Dan McCall
- American literature 1800-1950; the writing of fiction
- Kenneth McClane
- Creative writing; African American literature
- Maureen McCoy
- Creative writing; the novel
- Kate McCullough
- American literature after 1865; women’s literature; feminist literary criticism and theory; lesbian/queer theory
- Dorothy Mermin
- Women’s poetry; nineteenth-century women’s literature. Matthew Arnold. Victorian poetry and non-fictional prose
- Satya Mohanty
- Critical theory; twentieth-century literature; colonial and postcolonial studies; the novel; modernism/postmodernism; film
- Jonathan Monroe
- Modern and contemporary poetry; comparative/interdisciplinary approaches; modernism/postmodernism; critical theory; socio-historical and linguistic criticism; Romanticism and nineteenth-century poetry
- Robert Morgan
- Creative writing; American literature; English poetry; the twentieth century.
- Timothy Murray
- English and French Renaissance studies; theatre and performance; film and video; psychoanalysis; aesthetics; cultural studies; lesbian, bisexual, and gay literary studies
- Reeve Parker
- English Romanticism and related materials of the late Enlightenment and French Revolutionary periods in England, France, and, to a lesser extent, Germany, with special interests not only in works by major individual writers but also in the role of letters and theater in charting individual liberties and social and political responsibilities. Issues relating to literary aesthetics and interpretation, dramatic theory and performance, and the representation of familial, national, and international politics.
- Ernesto Quiñonez
- Creative writing; Latino/a fiction; protest literature; magic realism
- Masha Raskolnikov
- Middle English literature, allegory theory, medieval philosophy and rhetoric, contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer studies
- Carin Ruff
- Medieval Latin and Old English language and literature; narrative and historiography; history of grammar and language pedagogy; history of the book
- Neil Saccamano
- Eighteenth-century English and French literature and philosophy; print culture; poststructuralist theory
- Shirley Samuels
- American literature and culture; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American fiction; feminist criticism, American studies
- Paul Sawyer
- The literature of the Victorian period. Non-fiction prose-its form and genres, its audience, its historical and ideological functions; fiction and poetry of the nineteenth century; Marxian and feminist approaches and the ways questions of politics and ideology can be related to close local readings. Would welcome advisees interested in gay, lesbian and bisexual studies.
- Daniel Schwarz
- The British novel from Defoe through Joyce--special focus on Joyce, Conrad, Lawrence, Hardy, Forster, and Woolf--but also the Victorian novel; cultural criticism, especially the modernist tradition, including the relation between, on the one hand, painting and sculpture and, on the other, literature; twentieth-century poetry, especially Wallace Stevens; literary theory; the changing nature of literary studies and the profession; Victorian poetry and Victorian studies; and the history and theory of the novel.
- Harry Shaw
- Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction; historical fiction and literary form; history of the novel; theory of narrative
- Sandra Siegel
- English and Irish literary studies; the politics of Anglo-Irish literary culture; the social thought of the late nineteenth century; the concept of “modernity” in the twentieth century
- Stephanie Vaughn
- Creative writing.
- Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
- Creative writing; African American literature; 19th-Century American literature.
- Amy Villarejo
- American Studies; Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay literary studies; literary criticism and theory; the twentieth century; women's literature
- Helena Viramontes
- Creative writing
- Nicole Waligora-Davis
- African American literature; the nineteenth century; the twentieth century
- Winthrop Wetherbee
- Chaucer; Middle English; Classical and Medieval Latin; Dante; Old French poetry; Medieval literary criticism
- Sunn Shelley Wong
- Asian American, African American, and ethnic literatures; Asian Canadian literature; cultural studies
- Dagmawi Woubshet
- African American Literature; Ethiopian Poesis; Queer Studies; AIDS and Narratives of Loss; 1980s; Contemporary African and African American Visual Culture
- Samantha Zacher
- Old English literature (with a special interest in prose homilies and biblical poetry); Middle English literature; manuscript studies; rhetoric; studies in orality and literacy; history of the English language