Contemporary Literature
Our faculty in contemporary literature and culture are an appropriately diverse group. Areas of expertise include American literature and culture since 1945; African American literature and rhetoric; twentieth and twenty-first century world literatures in English; Latino/a literature; Asian American literature; American Jewish literature; the history of the avant-garde; poetics; the rhetorical discourses and practices of biotechnology; literature and other arts; post-postmodernism as the logic of “just-in-time” capitalism; queer theory; feminist studies; and disability studies.
Faculty in contemporary literature and culture teach graduate seminars in such subjects as African American literature, experimental poetry, contemporary fiction, science fiction, cultural studies, post-colonial literature, various ethnic literatures, and scientific and medical issues viewed from literary and rhetorical perspectives. We help students understand not only the means of cultural production but also the cultural production of meaning. While we profess no common methodology or object of study, we believe that contemporary studies offers something not available in other periods, the challenge of grasping the contemporaneity of the contemporary, together with the long-term transformations wrought by modernity over the course of the past few centuries.
Recent Grad Courses
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People specializing in this area
Faculty
Leisha Jones
Elizabeth Nicole Kadetsky
Brian Lennon
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Benjamin Schreier
- Post-1900 American literature and culture; Jewish American literature and culture; Ethnic literature; Novelty; Cold War and post-Cold War culture; Intellectuals and culture; Narrative nonfiction
Matt Tierney
Multiethnic fiction, activist poetry, novels about new media, intellectual histories of literary criticism
Graduate Faculty
Leisha Jones
Elizabeth Nicole Kadetsky
Brian Lennon
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Benjamin Schreier
- Post-1900 American literature and culture; Jewish American literature and culture; Ethnic literature; Novelty; Cold War and post-Cold War culture; Intellectuals and culture; Narrative nonfiction
Matt Tierney
Multiethnic fiction, activist poetry, novels about new media, intellectual histories of literary criticism
Graduate Students
Ivana Ancic
I work on contemporary Postcolonial literatures, especially the Global Anglophone novel and visual cultures. I also take a comparatist approach to contemporary literary phenomena in French and Spanish, especially in the African and Caribbean context.
Justus Peña Berman
Emeritus Faculty
Stephen R Grecco
Modern and contemporary dramatic literature
Kit Hume
Authors I have worked in include Acker, Brautigan, Burroughs, Coover, Gaiman, Kennedy, Powers, Pynchon, Reed, Rushdie, Vizenor, Vonnegut, and Wideman.
Linda Furgerson Selzer, Ph.D.
Susan Merrill Squier, Ph.D.
My most recent publication is Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor, from Duke University Press (2017).I also do research on comics and medicine. My co-edited collection with Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, PathoGraphics: Narrative, Aesthetics, Contention, Community, is forthcoming from Penn State University Press. I co-edit a series at Penn State Press called Graphic Medicine, and my co-authored volume, Graphic Medicine Manifesto, was published by Penn State University Press in 2015. In 2015, with J. Ryan Marks, I edited the "Graphic Medicine" special issue of the journal Configurations, of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, on "Graphic Medicine."