Faculty Research

Professor Neuman researches early and antebellum American literature; Puritan literature; early modern literature; poetry, poetry performance, manuscript and “amateur” poetry; and book history, manuscript culture, material textuality, and American print culture.

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Professor Levin specializes in contemporary British and postcolonial literature, transnational cultural studies, and critical and literary theory. His research focuses on the ways in which 20th-century global conditions have shaped contemporary culture and produced new discourses of self and identity. Professor Levin teaches introductory and advanced courses on Anglophone world fiction, contemporary British literature, English poetry, and cultural studies and social theory. His recent courses have included Fictions of Empire, Contemporary British Fiction and Culture, and Webs and Labyrinths: Imagining Globalization in Literature.

Professor Kasmer specializes in gender studies and women’s writing in late 18th- and early 19th-century British literature and culture. She is particularly interested in how the socio-political milieu and print culture between 1760 and 1840 shaped gender politics in Britain. Some of her courses include Making Gender in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Gender and Genre in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Jane Austen in Contemporary Culture, and The Terror of the Gothic.

Professor Jones specializes in the study of black women writers in the Americas, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, class, and nationality and theorizations of difference. She has a particular interest in speculative literatures and science fiction by feminists and writers of color, and how such texts attempt to theorize and/or critique how difference operates within contemporary culture.

Professor Huang researches and teaches representations of ethnic identities and politics in 20th-century American literature and popular culture. Her scholarship focuses on literary treatments of ethnicity in narratives about immigration, assimilation, and citizenship, and she is particularly interested in the ways in which the “ethnic” and the “American” persist as mutually exclusive terms in the American cultural consciousness. She also investigates the affinities between ethnic literature and science fiction, two bodies of work that, in her view, share similar critical and theoretical aims in their treatments of social, biological, and cultural difference.

Professor Elliott focuses on 19th-century American literature; textual editing; and contemporary literary theory.

Professor Blake’s research focuses on the ways queer pleasure is represented in modernist literature, and how those representations come to reshape existing literary forms. She also is interested in the relationship between modernism and popular forms of cultural production, including cookbooks, dinner theater, genre fiction, and women’s middlebrow fiction.

Professor Bastien focuses on Medieval and Renaissance literature; modernism; romance genre; and mythology and religion.