The Department of English

Armitage Hall, Fourth Floor, Rutgers University at Camden
Camden, NJ 08102
Tel:(856)225-6121 FAX:(856)225-6602


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The Faculty of the English Department

Timothy Martin, Chair

Timothy Martin, Ph.D., Pennsylvania -Associate Professor, Chair  

Modern British Literature, Irish Literature, James Joyce
418 Armitage Hall; 856/225-2818

Author of Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence (Cambridge, 1991) and co-editor of Joyce in Context (Cambridge, 1992) and Joyce on the Threshold (Florida, 2005). Guest editor of a special double issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on “Joyce and Opera” (2001). Presenter at numerous international symposiums; invited lecturer at the James Joyce Summer School in Dublin and the Trieste James Joyce School. Professional service includes directing the 1989 Joyce conference in Philadelphia and co-chairing the academic program of the 2000 International Joyce Symposium in London. Director of International Studies at Rutgers Camden and Chair of the Department of En glish. Member, Board of Trustees, International James Joyce Foundation.


Tyler Hoffman., Director of the Graduate Program

Tyler Hoffman, PhD, University of Virginia - Associate Professor
Director of the Graduate Program in English, Associate Director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, and Co-Director of the Walt Whitman Program in American Studies at Rutgers University-Camden.
American Literature and Culture, Poetry and Poetics.
416 Armitage Hall; 856/225-6615

Editor of the electronic American studies journal The Mickle Street Review and associate editor of the Robert Frost Review. Author of  two books—Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (University Press of New England, 2001) and Teaching with The Norton Anthology of Poetry: A Guide for Instructors (Norton, 2005)—and is finishing work on a book on the history and theory of public performance poetry titled “States of Change: American Public Poetry and the Performance of Culture.” He has published many articles and book chapters, including on John Brown and children’s literature, American Civil War verse, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Gary Snyder, Thom Gunn, and the contemporary slam poetry scene.  He is past president of the international Robert Frost Society.

J.T. Barbarese. Ph.D., Temple University - Associate Professor
Creative Writing, English and American Romantic, Modernist Literature
421 Armitage Hall; 856/225-6556
Webpage: http://crab.rutgers.edu/~barbares/index.html

Author of four books of poetry, Under the Blue Moon (University of Georgia, 1985), New Science (University of Georgia, 1989), A Very Small World (Orchises, 2005)  The Black Beach (University of North Texas Press, 2005), which won the Vassar Miller Prize, and a translation of Euripides’ The Children of Heracles  (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Poems in numerous journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Poetry. Poems anthologized in The Italian-American Reader (Morrow, 2003) and The Poetry Daily Anthology (forthcoming). Short fiction in Story Quarterly and The North American Review, and  literary journalism in Tri-Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, Studies in English Literature, The Journal of Modern Literature, The New York Times, and The Columbia History of American Poetry (Columbia University Press, 1993).  


Holly Blackford - Assistant Professor. 
American Literature, Children and Young Adult Literature.
426 Armitage Hall, 856/225-6310 

Holly Blackford is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she also directs the Writing Program. She teaches and publishes literary criticism on American, children’s, and adolescent literature, as well as Literatures in English. She has recently published articles on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Anita Diamont’s The Red Tent, Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, Shirley Jackson’s Haunting at Hill House, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Her book Out of This World: Why Literature Matters to Girls (Teachers College Press, education division of Columbia, 2004) analyzes the empirical reader-responses of girls to literature. She currently holds an International Reading Association research award  for the study of responses to Adventures of Huck Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird. Her edited collection on the centennial study of Anne of Green Gables is forthcoming from Scarecrow Press in 2008. She was elected to serve on the article award committee of the International Children's Literature Association for term 2005-2008.


Betsy Bowden, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley - Professor (on leave)
Medieval Literature, Folklore.
431 Armitage Hall; 856/225-6560

Author of  three books on Chaucer (1987, 1988, 1991) and one book on Bob Dylan (1982, 2nd edn. 2001). Work in progress, The AudioVisual Wife of Bath, 1660-1810, will treat verbal, visual, and musical interpretations of everyone's favorite pilgrim between 1665 (Richard Brathwaite) and 1809 (William Blake). Dozens of articles, beginning in 1979 with "The Art of Courtly Copulation" and covering topics such as medieval Latin pedagogy, folklore, Mark Twain's use of Malory, Ovidiana, Chauceriana, Dylaniana, and even Shakespeare. Several dozen solicited contributions to encyclopedias and pre-planned collections, covering topics such as the worldwide history of horseback riding as a means of transportation. 



Jill Capuzzo, BA, MS in Journalism, Columbia University – Instructor of Journalism
Journalism
480 Armitage Hall, 856/225-6110

 
Jill Capuzzo heads the Journalism division in the English Department at Rutgers University-Camden, where she is also faculty advisor to the school newspaper, The Gleaner. She teaches classes on news reporting and writing, plus several special interest subjects in the field of journalism. As a contributing reporter for the New York Times, her newspaper articles regularly appear in the paper’s Style, Real Estate, New Jersey, Weekend, business and daily news sections. She has also been a freelance journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, PhillyTech Magazine, and several trade publications. She was a staff writer for the Miami Herald, the Trenton Times and the Paterson News. She is the co-author of the book Philadelphia: First Class (Community Communications, 1997) and a contributor to the Weekend Journeys: 62 Getaways within a Day’s Drive of Philadelphia (Andrews & McMeel Publishers, 1995.)



Richard Epstein. Ph.D., California at San Diego - Associate Professor
Linguistics.
419 Armitage Hall; 856/225-6117

Author of papers on the semantics, pragmatics and discourse structures of English, medieval French and Tiipay (a Native American language spoken in San Diego county and Baja California, also known as Diegueño), including the journal articles “The definite article, accessibility, and the construction of discourse referents” (in Cognitive Linguistics, 2001), “Reference and Definite Referring Expressions” (in Pragmatics and Cognition, 1998); “L’article défini en ancien français: l’expression de la subjectivité” (in  Langue française, 1995), as well as chapters in  books such as Grounding (Mouton de Gruyter,  2002); Discourse Studies in Cognitive Linguistics  (John Benjamins, 1999); Conceptual Structure,  Discourse and Language (Cambridge, 1996);  Perspectives on Grammaticalization (John Benjamins, 1994). He is currently researching the use of the definite article in some of the earliest Old English texts as well as the use of language in current discussions of environmental issues.


Shanyn Fiske. Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania. - Assistant Professor
Victorian and Modernist British Literature, Director of Classical Studies Minor, Women’s Studies
422 Armitage Hall; 856/225-2937

Webpage: http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/dept-pages/classicalstudies/

Shanyn Fiske specializes in Victorian literature and the history of classical studies in nineteenth-century England.  Her work includes studies of Jane Harrison, Victorian productions of Euripides’s Medea, George Eliot’s Romola, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and its relation to Homer’s Odyssey, and references to sati (widow-burning) in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.  Her forthcoming book is  Heretical Hellenism: Women, Greek, and the Victorian Popular Imagination, which examines women’s roles in the popularization of Greek literature and culture in Victorian England. She is currently writing about the relationship between England and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and looking particularly at works by Alicia Little and Thomas Burke.  She directs the Classical Studies Minor at Rutgers Camden.
Christopher Fitter

Ph.D., Oxford - Shakespeare - Associate Professor.
17th Century Literature and Politics, Marxist and New Historicist Literary Theory, Literature and Landscape.
482 Armitage Hall; 856/225-6554

CHRIS FITTER'S first book, tracing conceptualizations of nature across three millennia of Western literature, art, and thought, was Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory, published by Cambridge University Press in 1995. It was reissued in paperback in 2005. His current book, Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Elizabethan Years, will reach completion in 2007. He has published book chapters in Shakespeare Left and Right (Routledge, 1991), Renaissance Texts and Contexts (Macmillan, 2003), Shakespeare’s History Plays (Longman, 2002), and Penser La Nuit (Honore Champion, 2003), as well as writing an essay on Landscape for The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998). He has published a dozen further essays in scholarly journals, including Shakespeare Studies, Milton Studies, Essays in Criticism, English Literary History, English Literary Renaissance, Early Modern Literary Studies, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Southern Literary Journal, and Southern Quarterly. He has written many reviews for EMLS and Notes and Queries.


William FitzGerald, Ph.D. University of Maryland - Assistant Professor
Rhetoric and Writing Studies
420 Armitage Hall; 856/225-2925
Webpage: http://crab.rutgers.edu/~wfitz/index.html

Bill FitzGerald specializes in rhetorical studies with particular interests in stylistics, speech acts, and the rhetoric of religion. In writing studies, Bill's interests include composition pedagogy, professional communication, and writing program design. He has published on the personal statement as professional discourse and on the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke. His book project, ongoing, is Speakable Reverence: A Rhetoric of Prayer.


Lauren Grodstein, BA, MFA, Columbia University - Assistant Professor
Creative Writing, Fiction and Non-Fiction, Modern Drama

483 Armitage Hall; 856/225-2934

Lauren Grodstein is the author of "A Friend of the Family," (Algonquin, 2009) praised by Publishers Weekly as a "gripping portrait of an American family in crisis." Her previous works include "Reproduction is the Flaw of Love," (Dial, 2004) an Amazon.com Breakout Book and a Borders Original Voices pick, along with the story collection, "The Best of Animals" (Persea, 2002) and the pseudonymous "Girls Dinner Club" (Harper Collins, 2005) which was a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, French, Turkish, and other languages, and her essays and stories have been widely anthologized.


M. A. Rafey Habib, D. Phil., Oxford - Associate Professor (On Leave)
Literary Theory and Criticism, Islamic Studies.
425 Armitage Hall; 856/225-6558

Author of four books: A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. Blackwell, 2005; An Anthology of Modern Urdu Poetry in Translation, MLA, 2003; The Early T.S. Eliot and Western Philosophy, Cambridge, 1999; and The Dissident Voice: Poems of N.M. Rashed: Translated  from the Urdu, Oxford, 1991. He is currently editing The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Vol. 6: the Nineteenth Century and The Oxford Anthology of Literary Criticism and Theory. He is also writing a short book Twentieth Century Literary Criticism and Theory.


Ellen Malenas Ledoux. Ph.D. University of Virginia—Assistant Professor
Romanticism, Gothic Literature, drama, novel, and non-fiction prose

Ellen Malenas Ledoux specializes in literature of the Romantic period. Her current book-length project examines the relationship between gothic writing and developing discourses of social reform in writers such as Horace Walpole, Charlotte Smith, Charles Brockden Brown, and William Godwin. Her most recent article, which appears in volume thirty-five of  Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, discusses Matthew Lewis’s political use of genre in his Journal of a West India Proprietor.




Howard Marchitello, Ph.D. SUNY Buffalo—Associate Professor  

Early Modern Literature and Culture, Science Studies, Shakespeare, Critical Theory
480 Armitage; 856/225-6110

Author of Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and editor of Thomas Middleton’s The Mayor of Queenborough (Globe Quartos/Nick Hern Books, 2005) and What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (Routledge, 2001).  He has published articles on Shakespeare, early modern garden theory, science studies, and early modern travel writing in English Literary History, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, New Centennial Review, and English Literary Renaissance, as well as book chapters in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2005), and Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2002). He serves as Associate Editor of the South Central Review (published by Johns Hopkins University Press) and a member of the editorial board of Literature Compass (Blackwell). His current book project—“Hamlet Machine: Early Modernity, Literature, and the Cultures of Science, 1585-1623”—is a study of the intimate relationship between literature and science and addresses such writers as Thomas Harriot, Shakespeare, Tycho Brahe, John Donne, and Galileo, among others







Robert M. Ryan. Ph.D., Columbia University - Professor 
British Romanticism, Religion in Literature.

Author of Keats: The Religious Sense (Princeton: 1976), The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature 1789-1824 (Cambridge 1997), and co-editor (with Ronald Sharp) of The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on John Keats (Massachusetts, 1998). Articles and reviews in Studies in Romanticism, The Keats-Shelley Journal, The Wordsworth Circle,  The European Romantic Review, The Romantic Movement Bibliography, and other periodicals .Member of the board of directors of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association. Co-Director of the Keats Bicentennial Conference, Harvard University, 1995.  Recipient of  the Conference on Christianity in Literature Award  and the British Council Prize in the Humanities (for The Romantic Reformation), the Keats-Shelley Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award,  the Warren I. Susman and the Charles and Mary Lindback Awards for Excellence in Teaching.


Geoffrey Sill, Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University - Associate Professor
18th-Century English literature,  Drama and the Novel.
478 Armitage Hall; 856/225-2990 

478 Armitage Hall; 856/225-2990  Author of Defoe and the Idea of Fiction (Delaware, 1983), The Cure othPassions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge, 2001), and articles in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, English Studies, Eighteenth Century Studies, Literature and Medicine, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.  Founding editor of The Mickle Street Review, 1979 to 1991, now edited by Tyler Hoffman; co-editor (with Roberta Tarbell) of Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts (Rutgers, 1992); co-editor of Opening the American Mind (Delaware, 1993); editor of Walt Whitman of Mickle Street (Tennessee, 1994); co-editor (with Peter Sabor) of The Witlings and The Woman Hater (2002), and editor of The Court Journals of Frances Burney, Vol. 5, 1789 (forthcoming).



Carol J. Singley Ph.D. Brown University - Associate Professor

19th/20th cent. American Literature and Culture, Childhood Studies, Narrative, Feminist Criticism, Composition.
479 Armitage Hall; 856/225-6629
Webpage: http://crab.rutgers.edu/~singley/ 

Author of Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge, 1995); editor/co-editor of five volumes: The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers, 2003); Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: A Casebook (Oxford, 2003); A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (Oxford, 2002); The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women (SUNY, 1993); and The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (New England, 1997). Articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century American writers, feminist collaboration, and the theory and practice of teaching of writing. Book in progress on literary representations of adoption. Co-founder of Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Kinship, and Identity. Former president of the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Edith Wharton Society, and the Womens Caucus of NEMLA.


Lisa Zeidner M.A., Johns Hopkins - Professor
Creative Writing, Contemporary Fiction and Poetry, Film and Screenwriting..
417 Armitage Hall; 856/225-6490
Webpage:  www.lisazeidner.com

Author of four novels, Customs (Knopf, l98l); Alexandra Freed (Knopf, l983); Limited Partnerships (North Point, l989) and most recently Layover (1999); and two books of poetry, Talking Cure (Texas Tech, l982); and Pocket Sundial (Wisconsin), which won the l988 Brittingham Prize in Poetry.  Has also written screenplays for Universal Studios and Focus Features.  Fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews in GQ, Mademoiselle, The New York Times, Boulevard, Poetry, The Washington Post and other publications. Recipient of the 1993 Warren I. Sussman Award for Excellence in Teaching and the  Provost's Teaching Award.



The Faculty Emeriti of the English Department

John C. Berkey, M.A., Ph.D., Pennsylvania

Marie Cornelia,  M.A., Ph.D., Fordham

Eddy Dow,  M.A., Iowa; Ph.D., Pennsylvania

Walter K. Gordon, M.A., Ph.D., Pennsylvania

William D. Lutz, M.A., Marquette; Ph.D., Nevada (Reno); J.D., Rutgers University

Diane McColley, Ph.D., Illinois

Donald Mull, M.A., Ph.D., Yale 

Robert M. Ryan, A.B., A.M., Ph.D., Columbia

James L. Sanderson, A.M., Michigan; Ph.D., Pennsylvania



424 Armitage; 856/225-6121
Dee Jonczak, Secretary

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