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Areas of Specialization

Modernism

Penn State’s English department has played a major role in fostering exciting new directions in modernist studies.  The Modernist Studies Association was founded here in 1998 by Penn State faculty Sanford Schwartz and Mark Morrisson, and faculty from other institutions. The first MSA conference, “The New Modernisms,” was held at Penn State in October 1999, and was featured in the cover story of the Chronicle of Higher Education, "New Life for Modernism." The English department continues to play a part in the MSA, and Morrisson was recently elected 2nd Vice President (rising to the presidency in 2011).

The department is committed to sustaining, developing, and enhancing the international field of Modernist Studies scholarship. We are made up of a vibrant group of scholars whose research interests reflect the interdisciplinary and international emphases of the “new modernisms.” Our scholarship intersects with numerous fields of critical inquiry--British and American literatures, Hemispheric Studies, Comparative Literatures, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Print Culture, Film Studies, Visual Culture Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Sex/Gender Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Disability Studies, among others. 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, nature and modernist literatures, surrealism and crime, the role of the Caribbean in U.S. empire building, little magazines, manifestoes, and the culture of 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: Robert Caserio, Jonathan Eburne, Sean X. Goudie, Janet Lyon, Mark Morrisson, Christopher Reed, Benjamin Schreier, Robin Schulze, Sanford Schwartz, Sandra Spanier, Susan Squier, and James West.

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:

Special Projects and Opportunities for Graduate Students
Graduate students studying modernism at Penn State have many opportunities to become involved in faculty and departmental modernist projects.

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, the 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.  Members work to create a visible presence at departmental events, and 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. 

Editorial Projects: The department features several editorial projects that involve graduate students.  James West is general editor of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition, and has involved several graduate students in the ongoing research for the multivolume project.  Sandra Spanier is Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, a 12-volume publication by Cambridge University Press that has been supported by an NEH grant. Students involved in the Hemingway Letters Project have gone on to publish articles on Hemingway and participate in international Hemingway conferences.  Mark Morrisson and Sean Latham (at the University of Tulsa) have recently founded a new Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, a biannual publication that fosters scholarship in the burgeoning new field of modern periodical studies, and Morrisson and Janet Lyon are editors of the multidisciplinary Refiguring Modernism: Arts, Literatures, Sciences book series published by Penn State University Press.

Research Libraries: 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.

Selected Recent Faculty Publications

Robert Caserio. The Novel in England, 1900-1950 : History and Theory. Twayne, 1999. Editor, The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-century English Novel, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2009

Jonathan Eburne. Surrealism and the Art of Crime. Cornell University Press, 2008.

Sean X. Goudie. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. [Winner, MLA Prize for a First Book, 2007]

Janet Lyon. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Cornell University Press, 1999.

Mark Morrisson. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905-1920. University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.
Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Christopher Reed. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. Yale University Press, 2004. Shortlisted for 2005 Modernist Studies Book Prize; Winner 2005 Historians of British Art prize for single-author book on a topic after 1800.

Benjamin Schreier. The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature. University of Virginia Press, forthcoming 2009.
Editor, Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

Robin Schulze. Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems 1907-1924. University of California Press, 2002.

Sanford Schwartz. C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009.

Susan Squier. Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine. Duke University Press, 2004.
Editor, Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture. Duke University Press, 2003.
Editor, with E. Ann Kaplan. Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (Rutgers University Press, 1999)

Sandra Spanier. Editor, with David Morrell. American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
Editor, Process: A Novel by Kay Boyle. University of Illinois Press, 2001.

James West. The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King. Random House, 2005.
Editor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers . Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Editor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Editor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Editor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Editor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men .Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Co-editor with Maureen Bell, et al. Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission. Ashgate, 2001.

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 PhD Placements
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