Faculty
Ana Acosta, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Columbia
Acosta's teaching and research interests include Restoration and 18th-century literature; early modern women writers; critical theory of the 18th century; comparative literature of the Enlightenment (British, French, German, Spanish); libertine fiction; religion, science and enlightenment; dictionaries, encyclopedias, and Biblical translation and interpretation; peninsular and Latin American literature; utopias. She is co-author of Literature: A World of Writing (Longman, 2010).
Moustafa Bayoumi, Professor; Ph.D., Columbia
Author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), and co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage), Bayoumi is a specialist in postcolonial literature and in literary theory. He has published essays on literature, music, history, architecture, and politics in Transition, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Souls, Arab Studies Quarterly, Interventions, Amerasia, Middle East Report, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books, and other publications. He served a three-year term on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and is currently an editorial committee member of Middle East Report.
Elaine Brooks, Professor and Deputy Chair for Administration; Ph.D., New York University
Brooks specializes in second language composition, applied linguistics, interdisciplinary collaboration on linked courses, and content-based instruction. She has written Making Peace, a textbook centered on global community, "Evaluating ESL Writing" (in Dialogue on Writing, ed. DeLuca, et al), and presented on a number of topics, including "Teaching Strategies for ESL Students in the Composition and Literature Classroom." In addition to serving as deputy for the ESL Program, she facilitated a faculty development seminar on Writing Across the Curriculum.
James Davis, Professor and Deputy Chair for Graduate Studies; Ph.D., Indiana University
Davis, who also teaches in the American Studies Program, has published essays on Henry James and Ida B. Wells, a book about the intersection of race and emergent U.S. consumer culture entitled Commerce in Color (University of Michigan Press, 2007), and Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Caribbean Diaspora (Columbia Univ Press, 2015). He is a recipient of a fellowship for 2008–09 at the Leon Levy Center for the Study of Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Monica de la Torre, Madelon L. Rand Distinguished Lecturer; M.F.A., Ph.D., Columbia
A translator, poet, and critic, de la Torre has published in both Spanish and English. In her teaching and in her creative and critical practices, she challenges received notions of closed national literary traditions. Her publications include Reversible Monuments (2002), The Happy End/All Welcome (2017), translations of South American poets Amanda Berenguer and Omar Caceres, as well as the forthcoming book Repetitions 19. She was Senior Editor at BOMB magazine for nine years and currently serves on the boards of Triple Canopy, Futurepoem, Ugly Duckling Presse's Senal series, and the theater company, New York City Players.
Martin Elsky, Professor; Ph.D., Columbia
Elsky is articles editor of Renaissance Quarterly and former coordinator of the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published on Renaissance devotional literature, Humanist language theory, Early Modern print culture, and the ideology of the Renaissance country house. A contributor to the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, he has published essays and book chapters on Donne, Milton, Jonson, Bacon, Herbert, Burton, and Vives. He is currently at work on two projects: German emigre scholars, especially Erich Auerbach, and the formation of U.S. medieval-renaissance literary criticism, and the material history of Early Modern English domestic architecture and personal consciousness in 16th- and 17th-century poetry and prose.
Joseph Entin, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Yale
His primary interests include American literature, cultural studies, visual culture, and the arts of social protest. He is the author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and co-editor of Controversies in the Classroom: A Radical Teacher Reader (Teachers College Press, forthcoming). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Novel, American Quarterly, New Labor Forum, Radical Teacher, Workplace, and The Novel and the American Left (University of Iowa Press, 2004).
Jason Frydman, Associate Professor, Ph.D. Columbia
Frydman is author of Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2013). His teaching and research interests include Caribbean, African diaspora, U.S. ethnic and world literatures; critical race theory; global modernism; dancehall and Jamaican cultural studies; Arabic slave narratives and new world Orientalism.
Renison Gonsalves, Professor; Ph.D. The CUNY Graduate Center
His major interests include linguistics, semantics, the philosophy of language, and the West Indian novel. He has published on such topics as "The mental representation of word meaning," and "Locke's definitional semantics." He has been a participant in NEH summer seminars on such topics as "Language and Man" and "Reference; Language and Reality."
Carey Harrison, Professor, M.A., Cambridge
Harrison is the author of many novels, including Richard's Feet, Cley, and Egon, which have been translated into nine languages, and plays for stage, radio, and television. He has directed Elizabethan, Jacobean, and contemporary drama at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, and elsewhere. Of his own dramatic writings, his 100th play to be recorded in a U.K. studio was broadcast in 2005.
Rosamond S. King, Associate Professor, Ph.D., New York University
King's research and teaching interests include Caribbean and African literature and culture, as well as sexuality, carnival, and performance studies. Her published articles include "Sex and Sexuality in English Caribbean Novels—A Survey from 1950," "Sheep and Goats Together—Interracial Relationships from Black Men's Perspectives," and "Dressing Down: Male Transvestism in Two Caribbean Carnivals." King's poetry has appeared in over a dozen journals and anthologies, and she recently held a Fulbright Fellowship in The Gambia, West Africa.
Nicola Masciandaro, Professor, Ph.D. Yale
A specialist in medieval literature, Masciandaro is the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, 2007) as well as articles and essays on the animal/human boundary, eros, sorrow, and mysticism. His current book project is entitled The One with a Hand: Labor, Embodiment, and the Animal/Human Boundary. Masciandaro is editor and founder of the online journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary.
Geoffrey Minter, Lecturer; Ph.D., Harvard
General interest in American literature from the Puritan era to the current century. Other, specific interests: the Enlightenment and related literary modes (Romanticism, the Gothic, etc.); the traditions of English lyric poetry, chiefly from Spenser to Stevens; aestheticism and decadence; queer representation and theory; boys and boyhood as literary subjects; literature, history, and new historicism; biography and autobiography; opera and film. Has written on the cultural importance of boyhood before and after the American Civil War, and other topics in American literature through the 19th century.
Simanique Moody, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., New York University
A speaker of multiple languages including French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, Dr. Moody specializes in African American language, particularly its roots and current practice in Georgia. She is especially interested in the sociohistorical contexts that shape language development. She has been a University Lecturer at Leiden University (Netherlands), has taught in New York City private and charter schools, and has served as a TESOL instructor in East New York, among other positions. A Library Research Fellow (2017) at the American Philosophical Society, her work has been published in English Today and The Oxford Handbook of African American Language.
Martha Nadell, Associate Professor & Director of Freshman Composition; Ph.D., Harvard
A specialist in African-American literature, her book Enter The New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (Harvard UP, 2004) examines image-text relationships in the Harlem Renaissance. She also teaches and writes about literary representations of Brooklyn.
Jonathan Nissenbaum, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., M.I.T.
His research, which has been funded by the NIH/NIDCD as well as the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Fonds de recherche du Québec Société et culture, focuses on syntax and semantics: the abstract structures that are formed subconsciously during language comprehension and production, and how these structures help determine sentence meaning. He is also interested in phonetic representation, and has a project that uses MRI to capture the movements of vocal articulators during speech production. His work has appeared in journals such as Natural Language Semantics and Linguistic Inquiry.
Tanya Pollard, Professor; Ph.D., Yale
Her research and teaching interests include Shakespeare, early modern drama, Greek drama, genre theory, theater in performance, literature and science, early modern mind/body relations, history of medicine, science, and gender. She is the author of Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford UP, 2005), the editor of Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (Blackwell, 2003), and the editor (with Katharine Craik) of Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Theater in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP 2013).
Marie Rutkoski, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Harvard
Rutkoski teaches courses in English Renaissance literature and history, children's literature, and fiction writing. She has published articles on children in English Renaissance drama in Studies in English Literature and Criticism. Her published novels for children and young adults include The Cabinet of Wonders (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux 2008) and The Celestial Globe (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux 2010).
Karl Steel, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Columbia
A medievalist, Steel's research focuses on relationships between humans and animals. He has published on the dominant medieval conception of being human ("How to Make a Human," in Exemplaria 20 (2008): 3–27), and has articles forthcoming on the deliciousness of human flesh in medieval anthropophagy narratives (in Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism (Ohio UP)) and on Shakespeare's short elegy, "The Phoenix and Turtle" (in the anthology Shakesqueer (Duke UP)). He participates in the medievalist blog In the Middle.
Ellen Tremper, Professor and Chair of the English Department; Ph.D., Harvard
Specializing in 19th- and 20th-century British poetry and fiction, Tremper has published many articles on Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and children's literature and is the author of "Who Lived at Alfoxton?": Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism (Bucknell University Press) and I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Film and Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2006).
Albena Vassileva, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Emory University
Her major areas of interest are 20th-century English and East European literatures, Romanticism, and contemporary literary criticism. She has contributed to journals such as Studies in the Humanities, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, The College Language Association Journal, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, World Literature Today, and others. Her monograph The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2015.
