Jess Rafalko
Managing Editor, Verge: Studies in Global Asias
EGO PhD Representative (2024-2025)
203 Burrowes Building, Cubicle J
Mailroom: 430 Burrowes Building
Mailroom: 430 Burrowes Building
Mailroom: 430 Burrowes Building
Fall 2024 Office Hours
Not teaching Fall 2024Curriculum Vitae
Education
MA, English, Penn State University (2022)
MFA, Creative Writing (Fiction), The Ohio State University (2018)
BA, English, King's College (2014)
Professional Bio
I am a PhD candidate in English. My dissertation, tentatively titled Grievance/Process: Forms of Labor in the Postwar American Novel, considers the writer as a worker within a novelistic system that challenges, restricts, or otherwise jeopardizes their agency. An excerpt from this project (on the limits of realism in Sabbath's Theater) is forthcoming in Philip Roth Studies.
I'm also a fiction writer. My short fiction has appeared most recently in One Story, and I am currently (interminably) at work on a novel.
Areas of Specialization
American Literature After 1900
The Post-45 American novel
Contemporary Literature
Contemporary realism
Creative Writing
The teaching (and institutionalization) of creative writing, the craft manual as a genre
Theory and Cultural Studies
Novel theory, formalism, Marxism