Janet Lyon

Professional Bio

Janet Lyon is an associate professor of English and an affiliate of the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Her scholarship focuses mainly on modernism, and especially its historical, sociological, and philosophical contexts in Ireland, Great Britain, and the global reaches of the British empire. Her first book, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, offers a history and a theory of the manifesto form, beginning in 1640 and focusing on its use by modernist and avant-garde groups. She is the faculty director of the Disability Studies undergraduate minor and also works & teaches in the field of Disability Studies, focusing especially on the emergence of "disability" as a category in the modernist period. She is completing a monograph titled 'Idiot Child on a Fire Escape': Modernism's Disability. She teaches lots of Irish literature, both on campus and in the Ireland summer study abroad program. She also teaches lots of women's writing. Her articles have appeared in Modernism/modernity, ELH, Yale Journal of Criticism and other journals in the field. She is on the faculty of Penn State's summer study abroad program in Ireland. She has won several college- and university-wide teaching awards including, most recently,the Penn State Alumni and Student Teaching Award (2010), and the College of the Liberal Arts Outstanding Faculty Advising Award (2013).