Areas of Specialization
American Literature
American Literature Faculty:
The English Department at Penn State has a long history of excellence in the study of American literature. Current members of the faculty specialize in authors and topics from the earliest period of our national literature to the most recent. Some doctoral candidates pursue archivally based projects; training for Ph.D. candidates is also available in feminist-oriented and theory-orientated interpretation. Among faculty interests are American women writers, American Cultural Studies, Native American Studies, Post colonial Theory, maritime literature, Atlantic Studies, History of the Book, professional authorship in America, American literature of travel and exploration, American literature and the environment, American literature and science, American Modernism and Postmodernism, scholarly editing, literary biography, automobile culture, and Disability Studies.
RECENT COURSE OFFERINGS:
Undergraduate:
- Fictions, Fashions, and National Passions in 18th-Century America
- Exploring the Early American Sublime
- The American Sea Narrative
- American Captive, Travel, and Slave Narratives
- Professional Authorship in the Time of Melville
- The Wilderness in American Literature; Representing Lewis and Clark
- The Literature and Cultures of the Appalachian Trail
- American Literature and the Problem of Justice
- Henry James and the Legacy of Hawthorne
- Money and the American Imagination
- American Decadence in the 1890s
- The Lost Generation Revisited
- Expatriate American Modernists
- American Detective Fiction
- American Autobiography
- Faulkner and his Literary Descendents
- Women, Mobility, and American Culture
Graduate:
- The Problem of Enlightenment in 18th-Century America
- Virtue's Commerce in 18th-Century Britain and North America
- The New American Literary Canon
- Sentiment and Sensation in 19th-Century America
- Emerson, Thoreau, and the Environment
- American Realism and Naturalism Reconsidered
- Studies in the American Renaissance
- Kay Boyle and Ernest Hemingway, Modernist Duet
- The American Literary Memoir
- Faulkner and Morrison
- Theorizing Readers
- What Was Cultural Studies?
SOME RECENT FACULTY PUBLICATIONS:
Carla Mulford, gen. ed., EARLY AMERICAN WRITINGS (Oxford, 2002)
Hester Blum, "Atlantic Trade," in A COMPANION TO HERMAN MELVILLE (Blackwell, 2006)
James L. W. West III, THE PERFECT HOUR: THE ROMANCE OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD AND GINEVRA KING (Random House, 2005)
Deborah Clarke, "Domesticating the Car: Women's Road Trips," STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION (Spring 2004)
Robin Schulze, BECOMING MARIANNE MOORE: THE EARLY POEMS (California, 2002) Michael Berube, ed., THE AESTHETICS OF CULTURAL STUDIES (Blackwell, 2004).
IN PROGRESS FACULTY PUBLICATIONS:
Sandra Spanier, gen. ed., LETTERS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
REPRESENTATIVE CURRENT DISSERTATIONS:
Steven Thomas, Cultures of Liberty and Mercantilist Poetics, 1690-1765
Rochelle Zuck, Virtue and the Cultivation of the Citizen, 1750-1850
Karen DeHerman, Convention, Caricature, and Beyond: Single Women in American Life and Literature, 1826-1899
Brandon Kempner, American Epistolary Culture
Carissa Turner, Spiritual Geography in 20th-Century American Women Writers
GRADUATE STUDENT TENURE-LINE JOB PLACEMENTS:
Auburn University, University of New Mexico, Rockford College, Illinois College, Eckerd College, Robert Stockton College of New Jersey, Lock Haven University, University of Akron, University of Wisconsin--Stout.
