Areas of Specialization
Modernism
Specialization Faculty
Penn State's English Department is committed to sustaining, developing, and enhancing the international field of Modernist Studies scholarship. We are made up of a vibrant group of over a dozen scholars whose research interests are truly interdisciplinary. Our scholarship intersects with numerous fields of critical inquiry-British literatures, American literatures, Comparative Literatures, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Visual Culture Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Sex/Gender Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Disability Studies, among others. We work with a variety of different theoretical approaches ranging from politicized formalism to new historicism to queer critique. Our projects-both collective and individual-examine a wide range of literary and cultural phenomena that constitute this rich and lively field including salon cultures, slumming, little magazines, automobile culture, manifestoes, nature and modernist literatures, surrealism and crime, and the relation between occultism and modern science. Further, we are committed to the production of scholarly editions of some of Modernism's most vaulted authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Faculty include:Robert Caserio, Deborah Clarke, Jonathan Eburne, Scott Herring, Janet Lyon, Mark Morrisson, Robin Schulze, Sanford Schwartz, Susan Squier, Sandra Spanier
Course Offerings in Specialization
Proseminars are frequently offered on Twentieth Century British Literature and Twentieth Century American Literature. A few of our recent offerings for specialized seminars have included:
- Modernism, Gender and the Cultures of Modern Science
- Sexologies
- Modernity
- Decadence, Modernism, Avant-garde
- Cosmo-Modernism
- Faulkner and His Literary Descendents
- Modern, Postmodern, & Beyond
- The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock
- Three Modernisms
- Queer Modernism
- British Avant-Gardism, Research in Modernist Little Magazines, Modernism and the Masses
- Expatriate American Modernists
- Hemingway: Author and Icon, Texts and Contexts
- Modernist Duet: Kay Boyle and Ernest Hemingway
Reading Groups and Other Resources
Centrally located in the heart of Pennsylvania's mountains, we are within a day's drive of many of the major archives for Modernist Studies-Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, the New York Public Library Archives, Princeton's Firestone Library, and New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to name but a few. Our own Pattee Library also boats a fine selection of original manuscripts and letters from modernists such as Kenneth Burke and Rebecca West.
Recent Faculty Publications
Faculty have published many books with major presses such as Cornell University Press, Duke University Press, the University of California Press, Princeton University Press, and the University of Wisconsin Press. Our articles are regularly featured in journals such as Modernism/Modernity Feminist Theory , Modern Fiction Studies , Arizona Quarterly , PMLA , Christianity and Literature, Yale French Studies, Studies in the Novel, and Symploke as well as compilations such as Blackwell's Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture , The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature , and The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism .
Current Disserations PhD
Currently, our graduate students have written and published monographs on topics in Modernist Studies ranging from questions of race and British modernism to the role of aesthetics and gender in modernist impersonality. Other topics have included modernist women poets, British modernism and the welfare state; animality and American modernism, and the place of nomads in the literature of Joseph Conrad.
Current Grad Publications
Our graduates have published with major presses such as Cambridge University Press, and have seen their articles printed in journals like Cultural Critique , Woolf Studies , Modernism/Modernity , Modern Fiction Studies .
Recent placements have included California State University, San Bernardino; SUNY-Fredonia; University of Alberta; West Virginia University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Tennessee; University of North Texas; Northeastern State University (Oklahoma); Illinois College; Miami University of Ohio; University of North Florida
Modernist Studies Workshop
The Penn State Modernist Studies Workshop is a group of graduate students in English and Comparative Literature who share an interest in the study of American, Anglo-Irish, and transatlantic modernisms. Transnational in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, our organization encourages collaboration between MA and PhD students in various sub-specialties of modernist studies. Founded in 2004, the group has evolved from its humble origins as a small reading group and now supports additional activities including a film series, symposia, a dissertation writing workshop, and an upcoming speakers' series. In addition to its scholarly pursuits, the group promotes pre-professionalization and social networking among its members. We work to create a visible presence at departmental events, and we play a role in the recruiting and mentoring of new MA and PhD students. Plans for the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 academic years include applying for recognition as an official Penn State student organization, developing a more visible web presence, hosting a student-faculty social, and planning a graduate literature conference. If you would like more information about the group's activities or to be added to the listserv, please email Amy Clukey: abc185@psu.edu.
