Department of English Faculty
Professors
Email: Timothy.Aubry@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-239
Phone: 646-312-3980
Timothy Aubry is professor of English and Department Chair. His research focuses on American Literature from the twentieth and twenty-first century, contemporary fiction, literary theory and criticism, and popular culture. He is the author of two books, Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (University of Iowa Press, 2011) and the co-editor of Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2015). His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point Magazine, n+1, Best American Essays 2014, PMLA, American Studies, and many other venues. He is currently working on a book focused on midcentury U.S. public intellectuals, including Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin, David Riesman, Susan Sontag and others, in order to understand the myth that has been built up around them and the functions this myth has come to serve. At Baruch, he teaches courses in American literature, the modern novel, world literature, and writing.
Email: Jessica.Lang@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-243
Phone: 646-312-3975
Jessica Lang is a Professor of English and Department Chair, specializing in early American fiction, Jewish American literature, women’s fiction and composition. A graduate of Cornell University and Brandeis University, she taught at Brandeis and The Johns Hopkins University before joining the Baruch English department in 2004. While at Baruch she has taught the American literature survey course, the American Novel, Jewish American literature, Representations of the Holocaust, Writing, and Writing and Literature. Her work has appeared, or will shortly appear, in Arizona Quarterly, Texas Studies in Literature and Languages, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Contemporary Literature and The Massachusetts Review. She is currently working on a book entitled Reading and the Self: Women’s Narrative in the Early Republic.
Email: John.Brenkman@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-243
Phone: 646-312-3921
John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor, teaches American literature, the novel, and various special topics in modern literature. He also teaches in the PhD Programs in English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and directs the U.S.-Europe Seminar at Baruch College. A literary critic and political theorist, Professor Brenkman’s latest book is The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11 (Princeton University Press, 2007): http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8523.html.
Previous publications include Culture and Domination (Cornell) and Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis (Routledge) and more than fifty essays and articles. Recent work on novel theory includes “Innovation: Notes on Nihilism and the Aesthetics of the Novel” (The Novel, Volume 2: Themes and Forms, ed. Franco Moretti [Princeton]), “On Voice” (Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Hoffman and Murphy [Duke]), and several essays for the journal L’Atelier du roman. Other recent essays include “Freud the Modernist” (The Mind of Modernism, ed. Mark S. Micale [Stanford]), “Queer Post-Politics” (Narrative), and “Extreme Criticism” (Critical Inquiry). He has lectured most recently at Columbia, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Stanford, Minnesota, University of Paris, and University of Turin.
Educated at the University of Iowa, Professor Brenkman taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University before coming to CUNY. He has been a fellow at the Oregon State University Humanities Center and a Visiting Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Institut du Monde Anglophone at the University of Paris III, and he directed an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers in 1995 on “Culture and Democracy: Emergent American Literatures.” He is a past president of the English Institute at Harvard University.
Professor Brenkman was a founding editor of the journal Social Text. He also edited the literary magazine Venue. He contributes regularly to the French political quarterly Le Meilleur des mondes. During 2008-2009 he is a participant in the seminar of the Great Issues Forum at the Graduate Center on the topic “Power in the Contemporary World”; he regularly contributes to the seminar’s blog: http://www.greatissuesforum.org/ (Seminar@The Forum).
Email: Grace.Schulman@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3941
Seeing, in April, hostas unfurl like arias, and tulips, white cups inscribed with licks of flame, gaze feverish, grown almost to my waist, and the oak raise new leaves for benediction, I mourn for what does not come back: the movie theater — reels spinning out vampire bats, last trains, the arc of Chaplin’s cane, the hidden doorways — struck down for a fast-food store; your rangy stride; my shawl of hair; my mother’s grand piano. My mother. How to make it new, how to find the gain in it? Ask the sea at sunrise how a million sparks can fly over dead bones. “Celebration,” from Without a Claim by Grace Schulman (Mariner Books, 2013).
Grace Schulman was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019 and was awarded the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, presented by the Poetry Society of America, in 2016. Her seventh collection of poems, Without a Claim, appeared in 2013 from Mariner Books. For her sixth collection, The Broken String, she won praise from Peter Makuck in The Hudson Review for her “sacramental vision” and from Wallace Shawn for seeing a “sharp, undeniable glimmering of beauty.” She is the author of Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin), which was selected by Library Journal as one of the “best poetry books” of 2002, and was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Award of that year; and The Paintings of Our Lives (Houghton Mifflin), a selection of the Academy of American Poets’ Book Club.
Schulman’s memoir is Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage (Turtle Point Press, 2018). Her book of essays, First Loves and Other Adventures, came out in 2010 (U. of Michigan Press). Among her honors are the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, New York University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Council on the Arts. Her poems have won five Pushcart Prizes, and have appeared in The Best American Poetry. Editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking, 2003), she is translator from the Hebrew of T. Carmi’s At the Stone of Losses; and co-translator from the Spanish of Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s Songs of Cifar. Schulman is former director of the Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1974-84, and former poetry editor of The Nation, 1971-2006.
Schulman, who received her Ph.D. from New York University, has taught poetry writing at Princeton, Columbia, Bennington, and Warren Wilson. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, the New Republic, Paris Review, the Hudson Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic, among other journals. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in journals, here and abroad.
Email: Eva.Chou@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3981
Eva S. Chou, a Professor of English, received her B.A. from Harvard College in English Literature and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in Chinese Literature. She is interested in works of art both as creative works and in their relation to China’s sense of identity. She has published in three scholarly areas: classical poetry, modern literature, and most recently, ballet in China.
For the classical period, Professor Chou published a study of the towering Tang-dynasty poet Tu Fu, Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 1996), as well as many articles on other classical poets and on literary history in journals such as Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. For the modern period, she published a study of the key modern writer Lu Xun, Memory, Violence, and the Queue: Lu Xun Interprets China (Association for Asian Studies Publications, 2012), as well as many articles in journals such as The China Quarterly and Asia Major. Both Tu Fu (Du Fu) and Lu Xun are often taught in Baruch’s Great Works of Literature syllabi. Her current project turns to the topic of ballet in China, which like many aspects of Chinese culture, draws heavily from its literary past. She is writing a history of ballet in China.
At Baruch, she has taught Writing I and I (ENG2100/2150), Great Works of Literature (ENG 2800), Asian American Literature (3032), Contemporary Asian Literature in Translation (3950), Post-colonial Literature (3030), and Anglophone Post-colonial Literature (3036).
Email: Frank.Cioffi@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-245
Phone: 646-312-3991
Frank L. Cioffi was born in Brooklyn. He has won awards from the NEH and from the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, which granted him three years’ of Fulbright Senior Lectureship awards. His publications include Formula Fiction? An Anatomy of American Science Fiction, 1930-39 (Greenwood Press), and The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers (Princeton University Press). His work has also appeared in scholarly journals, such as LIT, Narrative, The Chronicle Review, The Journal of English Teaching Techniques, Sub-Stance, Symploke, and elsewhere. He has taught at Indiana University, Eastern New Mexico University, The University of Gdansk, Central Washington University, Princeton University, Bard College, and Scripps College.
Email: Gerard.Dalgish@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3919
Location: NVC 7-277
Gerard Dalgish served for twenty-five years as ESL Director, and for six years as Writing Director. He has taught ESL Writing, Linguistics, Structure and History of English, and other Linguistics and writing courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. His areas of research, interests and publications are in the fields of Linguistics, African Languages and Linguistics, Lexicography, ESL Pedagogy, and Computer-Assisted Language Learning. In addition to his books, monographs, and some thirty scholarly articles, he publishes a CD-ROM containing twenty-five interactive ESL grammar programs. His current interests include database applications in linguistic research and technological assistance in assessment and grading. For information on some of the software he created, please click here.
Prof. Dalgish received his B.A. from Lehman College, CUNY; his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He has studied African languages, lived and taught in Tanzania and Sweden, and conducted workshops and taught in Israel and Viet Nam. He received the College’s Teaching Excellence Award and has been involved in numerous campus-wide committees.
Email: Lauren.Silberman@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3933
Office: NVC 7-274
Lauren Silberman is a Professor of English. She teaches courses at Baruch College in Medieval and Renaissance English, early women writers, classical literature and satire from Aesop through South Park. Her publications include Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene, Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (co-edited with Patrick Cheney) and articles on Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and L. Frank Baum. She has received the Presidential Excellence Award for Scholarship for “The Hermaphrodite and the Metamorphosis of Spenserian Allegory,” published in English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987) and reprinted in Critical Essays on Edmund Spenser, edited by Mihoki Suzuki. She has been invited to deliver the Kathleen Williams Memorial Lecture sponsored by the Spenserians at the Medieval Institute and the Hugh Maclean Memorial Lecture to the annual meeting of the International Spenser Society at the Modern Language Association. She is currently working on Biblical allegory in Shakespearean drama.
Professor Silberman received a B.A. degree from Smith College and a Ph.D. from Yale University. She has taught undergraduate courses at Yale University and the University of New Orleans and graduate courses in Renaissance literature at NYU and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Email: Michael.Staub@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3944
Office: NVC 7-282
Michael E. Staub is the author of The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). In tracing how psychological and neuroscientific research around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gratification, hyperactivity, and emotional intelligence migrated into popular culture and government policy, The Mismeasure of Minds documents the devastating consequences—above all for disadvantaged children of color—as efforts to undo educational discrimination and create enriched learning environments were recurrently repudiated and defunded. But the book reveals as well the long-denied and understudied phenomenon of repeated and widespread dissatisfaction—not least among white Americans—with the metric of IQ. By connecting the histories of experiments and policy in a single narrative, The Mismeasure of Minds offers new insights into the paradoxes of American racism. (For more, see “Ghosts of Bell Curves Past.”)
Staub’s other books include: Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis was Social, 1948-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (Columbia University Press, 2002), and Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930s America (Cambridge University Press, 1994). His interdisciplinary research has appeared in such journals as History of Psychology, American Studies, Representations, Radical History Review, MELUS, American Quarterly, and Studies in American Fiction, as well as in anthologies on Holocaust memory, American Jewish studies, critical race studies, and the history of therapeutic culture in the United States. He also edited The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook (University Press of New England, 2004), and wrote (with Kayla M. Williams) Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (W.W. Norton, 2005), an oral history that recounts the first-person experiences of Sergeant Williams, who served as an Arabic linguist in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, and that has appeared in Spanish, Dutch, and German translations.
His teaching and scholarly interests include modern and contemporary literature, psychology and literature, American cultural and intellectual history, documentary and nonfiction writing, American ethnic and minority literature, and Jewish and Holocaust studies. He holds a doctorate in American Civilization from Brown University, and was Professor of English and American Culture at Bowling Green State University before his appointment as Professor of English at Baruch in the fall of 2005. In addition, he has taught at the University of Michigan, Colby College, Rhode Island College, Michigan State University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. As a Fulbright Lecturer, he taught for a year in Germany at the Universities of Bremen and Frankfurt. He has been a member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Staub is the recipient of a Provost’s Award for Faculty Book Publication, an Outstanding Honors Teaching Award, as selected by the Honors Student Council, and several PSC-CUNY Research Awards. He is currently the Director of the Feit Interdisciplinary Seminar Program.
Associate Professors
Email: Christina.Christoforatou@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-4026
Location: NVC 7-273
Christina Christoforatou is Associate Professor of English specializing in medieval literature—Western-European and Byzantine—manuscript studies, and medieval cosmology. A native Athenian, she completed her secondary education in Greece before moving to New York to pursue undergraduate and graduate studies at the City University of New York. Her research interests have taken her back to Greece and to various European libraries—national and monastic—where she has studied the manuscripts of the Byzantine romances she was spoken and written on.
Her scholarship ranges broadly over medieval cultural poetics, Byzantine intellectual history, and iconographic expressions of power. Her essays examine the institutional and symbolic relation of literature to politics linking the role of the Byzantine literati to the court, the aftermath of political upheaval, and to figurations of power in literary and artistic commissions. They have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Enarratio (formerly PMAM), Italian Culture, Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Cultures in Confluence and Dialogue, Journal of the History of Sexuality (JHS), and others. In 2009 she was invited along with Sally N. Vaughn to edit a special issue for Journal of the History of Sexuality (JHS) devoted to medieval eroticism. Desire and Eroticism in Medieval Europe, Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries appeared in print in 2010. She is currently working on a book-length project that examines the interplay of sexual and political iconography in Byzantine literary texts and the influence of imperial patronage to literary evolution.
Before joining the faculty at Baruch in 2005, Professor Christoforatou taught courses in literature and composition at Brooklyn College and New York City College of Technology, where she also had the opportunity to introduce Writing Across the Curriculum. At Baruch, she teaches Great Works of Literature courses, electives in Ancient and Medieval poetics, survey courses in Medieval Literature, and Interdisciplinary Seminars. She has also served as interim coordinator for Writing Across the Curriculum and is participating faculty at the Baruch College Honors Program.
COURSES
Great Works of Literature I & II (ENG 2800 | ENG 2850)
Early English Litearature (ENG 4100)
Medieval Literature (ENG 4110)
Chaucer (ENG 4120)
Medieval Romance: A Comparative Study (ENG 4710)
Ancient Greek Poetics (ENG 5000)
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur (ENG 6001)
Political Literature from the Athenian Republic to the Global State (IDC 4050)
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Christoforatou, C. (2015). “Ontologies of Power in the Sovereign Politcs of Pindar and Machiavelli.” Italian Culture, 33(2), 87-104.
Christoforatou, C. (2011). “Figuring Eros in Byzantine Fiction: Iconographic Transformation and Political Evolution.” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Cultures in Confluence and Dialogue, 17(3), 321-359.
Christoforatou, C. and Sally N. Vaughn, eds. (2010). Desire and Eroticism in Medieval Europe, Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries: Sex Without Sex. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 19(1), 1-152.
Email: Allison.Deutermann@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-276
Phone: 646-312-3918
Allison Deutermann is Associate Professor of English specializing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture, with an emphasis on theater and gender studies. She is the author of Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and the co-editor of Formal Matters (Manchester University Press, 2013). Prof. Deutermann’s essays have appeared in edited collections and academic journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly.
Prof. Deutermann received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. At Baruch, she teaches English 2100, 2800, and 3010 as well as courses on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature.
Email: Judith.Entes@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3995
Office: NVC 6-252
I consider myself fortunate because I am able to combine three of my loves, regularly. They are teaching, reading, and writing. My philosophy of language and learning is best expressed in the chapter (“Connecting the Teaching of Reading, Writing, and Speech”) which I wrote for the book I co-edited, Teaching College English and English Education (NCTE, 1998).
We are so lucky to be located in the greatest city in the world. Consequently, I try to incorporate and integrate the surroundings into activities for the classroom. Collaboration is an integral part of life and writing; my piece in Writing With (SUNY Press, 1994) demonstrates the importance of writing with others.
I have presented papers at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the National Council of Teachers of English, National Reading Conference, International Reading Conference, American Educational Research Association, and Modern Language Association.
Email: Shelly.Eversley@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3960
Office: NVC 7-278
Shelly Eversley is Interim Chair of the Black and Latino Studies Department and Provost Faculty Fellow. She teaches literature, feminism, and African American Studies in the English Department and in the Black and Latino Studies Department. She is Andrew W. Mellon Director of Innovative Pedagogy, alongside Cathy N. Davidson, in CUNY’s Program for Transformational Learning in the Humanities. She has served as Academic Director of the City University of New York’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program and is Founder of equalityarchive.com, an open educational resource on gender equality. She is the author of The “Real” Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth Century African American Literature (Routledge, 2004) as well as several essays on literature, race, and culture. She is editor of The Sexual Body and The 1970s, both special issues of WSQ, a journal by the Feminist Press. She is also editor of the book Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics in 1960s African American Literature and Culture (forthcoming, Cambridge 2021), and is completing new book titled The Practice of Blackness: Cold War Surveillance, Censorship, and African American Literary Survival. She earned her undergraduate degree at Columbia University, and her graduate degrees at The Johns Hopkins University.
Email: Kevin.Frank@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-293
Phone: 646-312-3984
Kevin Frank attained his PhD and MA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his BA from the University of Southern California. He was also a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. A Guyanese native, Professor Frank has an abiding interest in literature and culture of the African and Asian Diasporas, particularly Anglophone Caribbean, but also U.S. and “Black” British. His concentration also encompasses Victorian and modern British studies pertinent to his focus on colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial issues.
SELECTED WORKS
“‘Whether Beast or Human’: the Cultural Legacies of Dread, Locks, and Dystopia.” Small Axe: a Caribbean Journal of Criticism 23 = 11:2 (Summer 2007), 42-62. (Historicizes and delineates the racial exploitation of one of the most potent Caribbean symbols, dreadlocks.)
“Female Agency and Oppression in Caribbean Bacchanalian Culture: Soca, Carnival, and Dancehall.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35: 1 & 2 (Spring & Summer 2007), 172-190. (Analyzes public sexual performances coming out of what Paul Gilroy identifies as part of the compensatory politics of the subordinated within Black Atlantic culture.)
“Abroad at Home: Xenomania and Voluntary Exile in The Middle Passage, Salt, and Tide Running.” Journal of Caribbean Studies 20:3 (Summer & Fall 2006), 161-183. (Re-examines the causes and consequences of Caribbean alienation.)
“Creole Carnival: Unwrapping the Pleasures and the Paradoxes of the Gift of Creolization.” The Atlantic Literary Review 6:3 (Summer 2005), 1-19. (Questions the efficacy of the poetics of creolization.)
“Two Kinds of Utility: England’s ‘Supremacy’ and the Quest for Completion in David Dabydeen’s The Intended.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 3:1 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami, 2005), online journal. (Concerns the Caribbean writer’s crucial confrontation with colonial literary models.)
“Caught in the Slips: Boundaries of C. L. R. James’ Imagination.” Journal of Caribbean Studies 15:3 (Lexington, KY: Association of Caribbean Studies, 2001): 223-244. (Investigates the lack of unity between historicists and poeticists in the Caribbean philosophical tradition, and the nostalgia for romantic ideals associated with the imperial order.)
“Censuring the Praise of Alienation: Interstices of Ante-Alienation in Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease, and Arrow of God.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies. Forthcoming (Spring 2010). (Revisits Achebe’s African trilogy and finds cause to censure Abiola Irele’s somewhat sacrosanct praise of alienation).
The critical insights of these scholarly essays coalesce in his forthcoming book on Caribbean ontology.
Email: Gary.Hentzi@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 8-265
Phone: 646-312-3890
A member of the Baruch faculty since 1987, Gary Hentzi is an Associate Professor of English. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a B.A. with High Honors in English from Oberlin College. He is co-editor and co-author of The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (published in 1995 by Columbia University Press). In addition to his work on criticism, he is a specialist in eighteenth-century English literature and has published several articles on the novels of Daniel Defoe, as well as a number of essays on contemporary film. He has been an editor of the journal Critical Texts and has lectured widely, both in this country and abroad, on English and American Literature.
Email: Stephanie.Hershinow@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-240
Phone: 646-312-3910
Stephanie Insley Hershinow is an Associate Professor of English, specializing in eighteenth-century British literature, the history and theory of the novel, experimental literature, and literary theory. She completed her PhD at Johns Hopkins and, before coming to Baruch, held a postdoc at Rutgers. She has received research fellowships from the Rotary Foundation and the Fulbright Program. Prof. Hershinow’s book, Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel, asks why the eighteenth-century novel is preoccupied with naïveté—with adolescent characters that don’t grow, mature, or develop in predictable ways. She’s also interested more broadly in questions of literary form, and especially in the weird shapes and configurations the novel took before it settled into the customs we recognize today. She has essays out or forthcoming from Novel, The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Romantic Circles. In addition to teaching Great Works and Writing at Baruch, she teaches courses on British literature, the novel, and on individual authors, like Jane Austen.
Email: Carmel.Jordan@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-287
Phone: 646-312-3943
Carmel Jordan is an Associate Professor of English specializing in Modern British and Irish Literature with a special interest in Gothic and Romantic Literature (both English and Irish). A native Dubliner, she holds a B.A. in English and Russian and an M.A. and Ph.D. (Fordham University).
Professor Jordan has published a book on William Butler Yeats entitled A Terrible Beauty: The Easter Rebellion and Yeats’s Great Tapestry, and numerous articles on English and Irish literature. A year spent at Moscow University and numerous other trips to Russia for seminars and conferences deepened her passion for Russian language, literature and culture, and these are also reflected in her research interests. Professor Jordan received the Presidential Excellence Award for Scholarship for her article entitled “Soviet Archeology and the Setting of the Squire’s Tale” which was published in The Chaucer Review. In addition to teaching the Great Works courses (2850), she teaches Modern Irish Writers, Gothic Literature, Romantic Revolt, and A Survey of British literature.
Email: William.McClellan@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-283
Phone: 646-312-3939
William McClellan is an Associate Professor of English. He specializes in Medieval literature and critical and cultural theory, especially the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the biopolitical theory of philosopher Giorgio Agamben. A graduate of Syracuse University, he earned his MPhil and his PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He teaches freshman writing, Great Works of Literature, as well as a variety of electives including a survey of British literature, Chaucer, Medieval romance, and Boccaccio. He has developed a course he titles “Zones of Hell: Dante’s Inferno, Levi’s Auschwitz,” which he offers every other year. He has been an English department student advisor for the past ten years.
His other scholarly activities include his participation in two NEH Summer Seminars: the first at The Huntington Library in California on manuscript codicology and the second at the American Academy in Rome on the appropriation of classical culture in Rome in the high Middle Ages. He has researched Middle English anthology manuscripts in libraries including the Bodleian at Oxford, The British Museum in London, and Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, and has published articles on those manuscripts in journals: Studies in Bibliography, Genre, and Text. He has also published critical essays in several anthologies on Medieval literature. An essay comparing Medieval rhetorical theory and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic discourse appeared in Exemplaria.
More recently he has published an article in that journal on Agamben and Chaucer, and chapters on Agamben, Levi and the new ethics of reading in two anthologies, The Legacy of Primo Levi and Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism. He is completing a book, Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz, which collocates the writings of Chaucer and Levi, and examines the ways the Holocaust has transformed our moral universe and changed how we read traditional works of literature.
Email: Mary.McGlynn@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-282
Phone: 646-312-3961
Mary McGlynn is an Associate Professor of English specializing in British, Irish, and Anglophone postcolonial literatures of the twentieth century. A native Texan and graduate of The University of Texas (BA) and Columbia University (MA, PhD), she taught at Columbia and at SUNY Purchase before arriving at Baruch in Fall 2000. She teaches Great Works (2800 and 2850), composition, surveys of British literature, and various twentieth-century electives. Mary McGlynn has published and spoken on James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, and other contemporary Scottish and Irish writers, as well as on film, country music, cultural studies, and Irish America. Her book, Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. Currently she is a member of the executive board of the American Conference for Irish Studies and the chair of Columbia University’s Irish Studies Seminar.
Email: Corey.Mead@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-247
Phone: 646-312-3981
Corey Mead is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in literacy studies, composition, rhetoric, and creative writing. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D.), his research focuses on the politics and history of literacy and education. His current project investigates the military’s longstanding influence on the forms, functions, and meanings of literacy in American society, and the ways in which this influence is now being made manifest through the military’s use of video games as training tools for its soldiers. Corey teaches a variety of undergraduate writing courses at Baruch.
Email: Sean.OToole@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3925
Office: NVC 7-239
Sean O’Toole specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, queer studies, and the teaching of writing. A graduate of Georgetown University (B.A.) and the City University of New York Graduate Center (Ph.D.), he was a post-doctoral lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program before joining the Baruch faculty in 2008.
He is the author of Habit in the English Novel, 1850-1900 (Palgrave, 2013) and is currently working on a new study of Oscar Wilde that resulted from an NEH seminar at the William Andrews Clark Library, UCLA. Early fruit from this project includes essays in two collections: ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Richard A. Kaye (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Wilde’s Other Worlds, edited by Michael F. Davis and Petra Dierkes-Thrun (Routledge, 2018). His work has also appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, The Henry James Review, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Modern Humanities Research Association’s Yearbook of English Studies (2019).
Professor O’Toole has spoken on such writers as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde at conferences in England, Ireland, France, and across the United States. He teaches Writing I (ENG 2100), Great Works of Literature II (ENG 2850), Introduction to Literary Studies (ENG 3005), Survey of British Literature II (ENG 3015), Victorian Literature (ENG 4310), Nineteenth-Century Novel (ENG 4320), as well as various special-topics courses.
Email: Rick.Rodriguez@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-288
Phone: 646-312-3938
Rick Rodriguez specializes in the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture. He is the author of Immunity’s Sovereignty and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Palgrave, 2020). In it he argues that the isolationist and exceptionalist ethos that defines U.S. national identity is an immunitary response to intense global contact and conflicts with such sites as Haiti, North Africa, and Cuba. Wars with North African regencies, responses to the Haitian Revolution, reactions to the specter and reality of slave rebellion in the antebellum South, and plans to acquire Cuba to ease tensions between the states all constituted immunizing responses that helped define the conceptual and aesthetic protocols by which the U.S. represented itself to itself and to the world’s nations as distinct, exemplary, and vulnerable. The book examines contradictions in literary texts’ dramatizations of these transnational events and their attending threats, revealing how democracy’s exposure to its own fragility serves as rationale for immunity’s sovereignty. He has also published articles on Edgar Allan Poe and Jacksonian democracy, Lucy Holcombe Pickens and U.S. filibustering expeditions to Cuba, Jose Marti’s affinities with the Confederacy, and on the uncanny dimension of subaltern laughter in texts by Jean Rhys, George Orwell, and Ralph Ellison. He is currently researching a book project on nineteenth-century Cuban writers’ interest in the U.S. South. Other research and pedagogical fields of expertise include Latinx literature and culture, hemispheric and comparative studies of the Americas, political philosophy, and affect theory. At Baruch, he teaches the Survey of American Literature I, The American Novel, Latinx Literature, Literature and Globalization, and Great Works of Literature II.
Email: Cheryl.Smith@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-242
Phone: 646-312-3973
Cheryl C. Smith specializes in composition, writing across the curriculum, faculty development, environmental literature, and early American literature. She is writing across the curriculum coordinator at Baruch and serves on the CUNY-wide planning committee for the professionalization of graduate writing fellows. She also runs faculty development seminars on topics related to teaching with writing, assignment design, and interdisciplinary teaching.
Her recent publications include “Technologies for Transcending a Focus on Error: Blogs and Democratic Aspirations in First-Year Composition” in Journal of Basic Writing, (spring 2008), “Giving Voice to the Novice Authority: Silent Spring in the Composition Classroom” in Teaching North American Environmental Literature (MLA, 2008), “Opening the Invisible Gateway: Some Common Things About Student Writing” in Reclaiming the Public University: Conversations on General & Liberal Education (Peter Lang Press, 2007), “New Scholars Talk Back: The City University of New York and the Shaughnessy Legacy Thirty Years Later” in Journal of Basic Writing (fall 2007), and “Out of Her Place: Anne Hutchinson and the Dislocation of Power in New World Politics” in Journal of American Culture (Dec 2006). She is currently co-editing a book, Transformative Spaces: Designing Creative Sites for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, to be published by Springer Press in 2009, and beginning work on a new book project, The Essay and the Academy: College Writing for Contemporary Writers.
Professor Smith attended Tufts University, receiving her BA in Spanish and English and her MA and PhD in English. At Tufts, she directed a summer intensive college-level writing immersion for high school students and taught courses in the departments of English, American studies, and environmental studies. She went on to teach expository writing and environmental ethics at Harvard before coming to Baruch in 2003. She now enjoys teaching a variety of courses including first-year composition, advanced essay writing, great works of literature, the American literature survey, and the graduate seminar in teaching composition.
Assistant Professors
Email: Lisa.Blankenship@baruch.cuny.edu
Website/CV: https://lisagblankenship.org/
Location: NVC 7-245
Phone: 646-312-3920
Lisa Blankenship joined the faculty at Baruch in the fall of 2014 after receiving her Ph.D. in English (Rhetoric and Composition) from Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. Her scholarly interests center on rhetorical theory, public sphere rhetoric, rhetorical ethics, and digital rhetoric.
She just finished a four-year project, a co-edited, born digital book titled “The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces in and Beyond the Classroom,” about participation as a graded component of college writing classes, with Paige Banaji, Katherine DeLuca, Lauren Obermark, and Ryan Omizo. The project, forthcoming from the Computers and Composition Digital Press, an imprint of Utah State University Press, examines the function of assessing a traditionally subjective aspect of pedagogy: the ubiquitous “participation grade,” looking at how such assessment plays out in ESL/transnational contexts, hybrid and online courses, and writing programs and writing centers, using a variety of analytical frames such as disability studies, queer theory, feminist theory, and methods from big data analysis.
She currently is in the final stages of a book project about empathy as a rhetorical concept, the first sustained exploration of empathy in rhetorical theory. It examines how writers in public, digital, and transnational locations ethically engage with one another across pronounced differences. The book’s premise is that pathos, or appeals to emotions in the form of stories, forms a vital link between Aristotle’s treatment of rhetoric and poetics and is one of the most powerful forms of persuasion and change. It attempts to theorize what may seem like a commonplace: that an effort to listen to and understand others, especially those very different from us, helps us be more human, more able to react in ethical and rhetorically effective ways, and ultimately helps sustain us in the midst of polarization and, in some cases, deep and traumatic injustice.
She teaches first-year writing courses with themes focused on rhetoric, language, race, whiteness, gender, identity, and digital media, and in fall 2017 developed and taught a special topics course, ENG 3960, on Digital Storytelling. She mentors students at the CUNY Graduate Center who teach in the English Department at Baruch and is one of the faculty coordinators of the Writing Across the Curriculum program. She also directs the First-Year Writing Program at Baruch, where on average 70 adjunct and full-time faculty teach each year, with an enrollment of almost 5,000 annually in two required courses.
Email: matthew.eatough@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-240
Phone: 646-312-3910
Matthew Eatough joins Baruch from Vanderbilt University, where he taught courses in English literature, cultural studies, and critical theory. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin (BA), the University of Chicago (MA), and Vanderbilt University (MA, PhD) he specializes in 20th and 21st century Anglophone literature, with an emphasis in British, Irish, and South African literature. Professor Eatough’s research investigates how economics, literature, and the emotions intersect within a wide range of different disciplines and literary traditions. This includes world-systems theory, biotechnology, British and Irish modernism, African literature, and Atlantic studies. He is currently at work on a book project that examines how certain conventional imperial genres have helped us to imagine the emotional framework of globalization. He is the assistant editor of The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford, 2012) and the author of recent and forthcoming essays in Modern Language Quarterly, Literature and Medicine, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Safundi.
Most recent or current research:
I am currently at work on a book manuscript that joins economic history and quantitative literary history with close reading in order to examine how certain conventional imperial genres have helped us to imagine the emotional framework of globalization.
Subject Matter Expertise (topics):
Late-nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century Anglophone literature; African literatures, esp. South African; Irish literature; British literature; global modernisms; transnationalism; affect theory; world-systems theory; economic history and literature; biotechnology and literature
Degrees (with institution):
Vanderbilt University (M.A., English; Ph.D., English)
University of Chicago (M.A., Humanities)
University of Wisconsin-Madison (B.A., English and History)
Affiliations (boards, organizations):
Modern Language Association, Modernist Studies Association, American Comparative Literature Association, American Conference for Irish Studies, North American Victorian Studies Association
Most recent publications (articles and/books) or exhibitions:
Assistant Editor, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (OUP, 2012)
“Bowen’s Court and the Anglo-Irish World-System” MLQ 73.1 (March 2012)
“The Time That Remains: Organ Donation, Temporal Duration, and Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” Literature and Medicine 29.1 (Spring 2011)
Email: Amina.El-Annan@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-247
Phone: 646-312-3982
Amina El-Annan is an Assistant Professor of English. She received her BA from the University of California-Los Angeles and her PhD from Yale University. Her scholarship and teaching interests include globalization and culture; U.S. literature and culture in it’s international context; contemporary American literature; the circulation of culture in the Middle East; transnationalism; and the role of art, film, and fiction in social movements. Her current research explores the meaning of empathy, with a particular focus on cross-cultural empathy. Her book manuscript, Multiple Orients: Urban Dream Maps, Creative Currency and the Countercultures of Modernity, explores the interrelationship between emergent digital technologies, new genres of literature about globalization, and the politics of affect and sentiment, with a particular focus on transnational methodology as a means for uncovering different types of humanism—born of survival, poverty, and of anti war struggles. She is a former visiting fellow for the Ethnicity, Race, & Migration program at Yale University.
Email: adrian.izquierdo@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3932
Location: NVC 7-248
Adrian Izquierdo is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Baruch College. He holds an MA from the University of Cergy-Pontoise, France, and a PhD from The Graduate Center (CUNY). He has been a fellow at the University of Poitiers (France), the Leon Levy Center for Biography (New York), and the École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques, “Casa Velázquez” (Madrid). He’s also been a member of the Folger Institute’s Year-Long Colloquium on “Renaissance/Early Modern Translation.”
Prof. Izquierdo’s research interests revolve around the translation of texts and ideas across cultural divides in Renaissance literature, and in today’s globalized world. As a member of Pólemos, a digital humanities research group based at La Sorbonne University, he has recently completed the critical edition of the first three biographies of Luis de Góngora for their digital repository (http://obvil.sorbonne-universite.site/corpus/gongora/). He is also an Associate Member of the research group RÉMÉLICE (Réception et mediation de littératures et cultures étrangères et comparées), based at the University of Orléans, France.
Prof. Izquierdo has published several articles on Renaissance literature and translation both in Europe and in the U.S. His book, Pierre Matthieu en España. Biografía, política y traducción en el Siglo de Oro [Pierre Matthieu in Spain: Biography, Politics and Translation in the Spanish Golden Age] (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2019) reconstructs the intricate web of connections established among early modern humanists who used ancient biography and translation to probe into the political landscape of their times in England, Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. It also explores the role of translation and translators in the development of the genre of political biography in 17th-centuy France and Spain (https://www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es/FichaLibro.aspx?P1=159565).
In 2017, Prof. Izquierdo was the guest editor of the “New York in Translation” issue of the literary journal Los bárbaros (https://losbarbarosny.com/2017/10/26/the-barbarians/). Before coming to Baruch College, he taught literature, languages (Spanish and French), and translation at Hunter College (CUNY). At Baruch, he teaches courses in the Great Works program and on cultural translation, translation studies, and translation history.
Email: Laura.Kolb@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-293
Phone: 646-312-3931
Laura Kolb began teaching at Baruch in 2014, after receiving her PhD in English from the University of Chicago. Her research examines the social and rhetorical dimensions of economic life in early modern English literature and culture. Her current book project, focused primarily on dramatic and practical texts, explores the ways in which plays and handbooks imagine economic credit as both deeply interpersonal and highly manipulable, embedded in relationships and subject to alteration by means of artful language and skilled interpretation. At Baruch, she teaches courses in Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, British Literature, and Writing. She has published articles on Renaissance plays and poetry in The Forum for Modern Language Studies and The Sidney Journal and has an essay on Ben Jonson forthcoming in Disgust in Early Modern English Literature (Ashgate).
Email: Daniel.Libertz@baruch.cuny.edu
Website: https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/daniellibertz/
Daniel Libertz is an Assistant Professor in the English Department and is also the Associate Director of the First-Year Writing Program at Baruch College, CUNY. He received his Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh, his M.A. in English from SUNY New Paltz, and his B.A. in English and Secondary Education from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). He teaches courses in first-year writing, data-driven public writing, and other courses related to writing and rhetoric. His research focuses on statistical rhetoric in public writing, digital and quantitative writing pedagogies, and social media analysis. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Res Rhetorica, Adult Learning, and The Proceedings of the Annual Computers and Writing Conference. He is currently writing about how statistics are used in social movements in ways that simultaneously make abstract arguments about scale while also making embodied, memorable, and emotional appeals for taking action.
Email: Erica.Richardson@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-257
Erica Richardson is an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. She received her dual B.A. in English and Classical Civilization from Wellesley College and her PhD from Columbia University. Her scholarship and teaching interests include the aesthetics and intellectual history of black social life as depicted in late 19th and 20th century African American literary production; the corpus and thought of W.E.B. Du Bois; print culture of the Harlem Renaissance; African American drama; and theories of gender and sexuality in African American literature. Her current research project explores how black authors incorporate, critique, and subvert the discourses of the so-called Negro problem through a range of literary productions following the demise of Reconstruction through the Harlem Renaissance. She has presented segments of her work at the American Studies Association (ASA), the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), and the American Literature Association (ALA). At Baruch, she teaches courses in the Great Works program and on Harlem Renaissance and Black Women’s Writing.
Email: Brooke.Schreiber@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 4-284
Phone: 646-312-4326
Brooke Schreiber is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Baruch College, where she teaches courses in second language writing, grammar, globalization of English, and other topics in linguistics. Her research focuses on second language writing pedagogy, translingualism, and global Englishes, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Language Learning and Technology, Composition Studies, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and the Journal of Second Language Writing, and in the edited collection Transnational Writing Education: Theory and Practice. She is currently writing about a collaborative online intercultural learning project between the U.S. and Sri Lanka, considering how these interactions impact students’ beliefs about the connections between language and race.
Email: Steven.Swarbrick@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-298
Website: www.stevenswarbrick.com
Phone: 646-312-3936
Steven Swarbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, specializing in early modern English literature and the environmental humanities. His research spans sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature; ecocriticism; new materialist philosophies; gender and sexuality studies; and psychoanalysis. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Cultural Critique, Discourse, Postmodern Culture, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and postmedieval, as well as in several edited anthologies, including Queer Milton. He has also coedited, with Karen Raber, a special issue of Criticism on “Renaissance Posthumanism and Its Afterlives.”
He is currently completing work on his first book project, “Materialism without Matter: Environmental Poetics from Spenser to Milton,” which uses the tools of psychoanalysis to posit a Lucretian unconscious of matter in both early modern English literature and the “new materialisms.” He has also begun work on two new projects: “Shakespeare’s Earth: Elements, Affects, Climate Politics,” which brings together ecocriticism, critical race studies, and other intersectional frameworks to analyze Shakespeare’s representations of the Earth-system; and “Deleuze and the Intolerable,” which critiques affirmative readings of Deleuze and offers an account of Deleuzian negativity vis-à-vis other schools of thought, including queer theory and Afropessimism.
He earned his PhD in English from Brown University. In 2016-17, he was a postdoctoral fellow in English at Tulane University. At Baruch, he teaches courses in early modern literature, environmental humanities, and literary theory.
Email: Rafael.Walker@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-253
Phone: 646-312-3992
Rafael Walker, assistant professor of English at Baruch College, specializes in American and African American literature, theory of the novel, and gender and sexuality studies. A wide-ranging scholar, he is working on two book-length projects at present—one on the American realist novel and the other on biraciality in American culture. The first project, “Realism after Individualism: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel,” traces the remarkable ways in which early-twentieth-century American writers adapted the realist novel to the peculiar conditions of their age, a task that required a decisive break from their European predecessors. The second project, “Black Lives? Biraciality in American Literature and Culture,” focuses on a long line of writings about—and often by—mixed black-and-white people in the U.S. Maintaining that scholars have mostly erred in classifying these texts as works of African American literature, Walker argues that these writers’ fervent attempts to carve out space in the American imagination for biracial existence constitute a distinct tradition.
Essays related to both of these longer projects have appeared or will appear soon in a variety of venues—J19, Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, and Genre among them. His essay “Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing,” published in MELUS, won the Modern Language Association’s 2016 Crompton-Noll Award for Best Essay in LGBTQ Studies. He also occasionally writes about issues in higher education; some of his work in this vein has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Before coming to Baruch, he taught at several colleges and universities along the East Coast. Here, he teaches courses in his various areas of specialization—primarily American and African American fiction—as well as courses in Baruch’s scintillating Great Works Program.
He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. at Washington University in St. Louis.
Lecturers
Email: Amy.Baily@baruch.cuny.edu
Amy Baily has a BA from the George Washington University, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University in St Louis. She has previously taught undergraduates at Washington University in St Louis, Bard Early College in Harlem, Montclair State University, and John Jay College, CUNY. Her publications include reviews, non-fiction, short fiction, and a US patent.
Email: Kamal.Belmihoub@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-278
Phone: 646-312-3908
Kamal Belmihoub joined Baruch College in August 2017 after completing a PhD in Second Language Studies/ESL at Purdue University. He is interested in writing studies and world Englishes. He taught English as a second language and developed curricula for intensive English programs, and taught introductory and professional writing.
Email: Harold.Ramdass@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 7-290B
Phone: 646-312-3958
Harold N Ramdass earned his BA in English/Honors from Baruch College and his PhD from Princeton University, where he focused on Early Modern drama and poetry. His teaching history spans First-Year and Capstone Composition, Caribbean Literature, World Literature, The Fairy Tale, and Shakespeare. His background includes extensive writing-center experience, which continues to influence on his pedagogy.
