Our faculty in contemporary diasporic literatures and cultures 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; Jewish American literature; the history of the avant-garde; colonial and decolonial poetics; the rhetorical discourses and practices of biotechnology; literature and other arts; post-postmodernism; the dicourses of 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, 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.
Some Recent Graduate Seminars
Colonial Power, Postcolonial Malaise and Decolonial Space/Time: A Global Postcolonial Literature Survey including Key Postcolonial Classics and Decolonial Theory
Speculative Fiction
Transnational Writing Studies
Arab American Literature
Jewish American Literature
Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures: Reading Beyond Race
Novel Novels: 20th and 21st Century Narrative Experiments
Decolonial-Global South Health Humanities
Period Studies in African American Literature: Black Dawning: African Diasporic Writing before 1900
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Global Asias as Tactic & Theory
Graduate Faculty
Asian American literary and cultural studies, multi-ethnic literatures, critical ethnic studies, speculative fictions, contemporary drama, genre
Girl Literature, Women Writers, Electronic Literature
Fiction and nonfiction creative writing workshop; the novel; the short story; the novella; the lyric essay; memoir; comics; the nonfiction novel; writers on writing; authorship, ownership and literary license; the international short story; what is creative nonfiction?
Artificial intelligence and contemporary literature; artificial intelligence and creativity more generally; Silicon Valley fiction and memoir
- Post-1900 American literature and culture; Jewish American literature and culture; Ethnic literature; Cold War and post-Cold War culture; Intellectuals and culture; Arab American Literature
Graduate Students
Contemporary Literature, American Literature after 1900, Speculative Fiction,
Contemporary realism
