The English faculty -- accomplished teachers and scholars -- have a variety of research interests, including 20th-century British literature, literature of the South, Native American literature, Medieval drama, African-American literature, Restoration and 18th-century British literature, critical theory, women's literature, creative writing, and 19th and 20th-century American literature.
Christiane Gannon received her bachelor's degree in English from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and her master's and Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins University. Her teaching and research interests include Victorian and Modernist British literature, the history and theory of the novel, religion and literature, the history of education, women and literature, and literature and art. In July 2012 she completed her dissertation – “Ideal Reading: Pedagogy, Bildung, and the Rise of Literary Studies in England” – in which she investigates the ways in which the rise of English as a subject of study in schools led to novelists’ debates about the form of the novel and its social role. At Hamilton, she will be teaching courses on late 19th- and early 20th-century British poetry, prose and fiction.
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A member of the Hamilton faculty since 1996, Naomi Guttman holds a MFA degree from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of Southern California. Her first book, Reasons for Winter, won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry in Quebec, and her second, Wet Apples, White Blood, won the Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Guttman's teaching and research interests include poetry and poetics, food writing, contemplative pedagogy and environmental and feminist literary study. Her current project is a novella-in-verse titled The Banquet of Donny and Ari.
Tina Hall earned an M.F.A. in fiction from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. Her novella, All the Day's Sad Stories, was published by Caketrain Press in the spring of 2009. Hall was named the 2010 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation’ s most prestigious awards for a book of short stories. Hall’s book, The Physics of Imaginary Objects, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in fall 2010.
Hall's fiction has appeared in 3rd bed, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, descant, Water-Stone Review, and other literary journals. She has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. Hall's teaching interests include monsters, the gothic, technology’s relationship with the body, contemporary fiction and experimental women writers.
Doran Larson teaches courses in prison writing, the history of the novel, 20th-century American literature, and creative writing. He has published articles on Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James and popular film. Since November of 2006, he has taught a creative writing course inside a maximum-security state prison. Larson's essays on prison writing and prison issues have been published in College Literature, Radical Teacher, English Language Notes and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is the editor of two forthcoming volumes: The Beautiful Prison, a special issue of the legal journal, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society; and Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in American. He is also the author of two novels, The Big Deal (Bantam, 1985), and Marginalia (Permanent, 1997). Larson's stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Boulevard, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review and Best American Short Stories. The Iowa Review published his novella, Syzygy, in 1998. He has also published travel writing, magazine features, and paid op-eds.
Vincent Odamtten joined the Hamilton faculty in 1985, after earning a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. While he specializes in African, Caribbean and African American literatures, Odamtten also teaches science fiction and postcolonial criticism. He has published an acclaimed book, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo (1994), and has contributed articles to a number of critical anthologies, including Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo (1998), Challenging Hierarchies: Issues and Themes in Colonial and Post-Colonial Narratives (1997), Of Dreams Deferred, Dead Or Alive: African Perspectives on African-American Writers (1996) and Language in Exile: Jamaican texts of the 18th & 19th Century (1990). In 2007, Broadening the Horizon: Critical Introductions to Amma Darko, a collection of articles edited by Odamtten, was published in England. In 2012 he published an article "Not Just for Children Anymore: Aidoo's The Eagle and the Chickens and Questions of Identity" in Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70. Currently, he is researching the life and times of Togbi Sri II, Paramount Chief of the Anlo-Ewes of Southeastern Ghana, as part of a multimedia narrative project.
Onno Oerlemans earned his Ph.D. from Yale University. He has published articles on the form and function of lyric in Whitman, Milton and Wordsworth, on literary theory and Henry James, and on animal rights and taxonomy in romanticism. Oerlemans’ book Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (University of Toronto Press, 2002) examines the many ways in which romantic-period authors explore and represent the physical presence of the natural world. He has recently published articles on the representation of animals in Coetzee and Gowdy, the romantic origins of environmentalism, and architecture in romantic period writing. Oerlemans is currently writing a book about the representation of animals in the history of poetry.
John O'Neill, who has been a member of the Hamilton faculty since 1972, received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota. His research interest is the literature of Restoration England, 1660-1700. O’Neill is the author of George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (1984) and has published articles and reviews in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Huntington Library Quarterly, Modern Philology and the Durham University Journal. Among his publications are “Rambler and Cully: Rochester’s Satire and the Self-Presentation of the Restoration Rake” (2005), “Samuel Pepys: The War of Will and Pleasure” (1995), and “Composite Authorship: Katherine Philips and an Antimarital Satire” (1993). O’Neill is a contributing editor of the Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Drama (2001). He is a contributing editor of the journal The Scriblerian and a member of the editorial board of the journal Restoration.
Patricia O'Neill teaches 19th century British literature and Women Filmmakers. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and is the author of Robert Browning and 20th Century Criticism (1995), editor of Olive Schreiner's 1883 novel Story of an African Farm (2002) and contributor of essays on globalization and cinema. O'Neill's current work is the creation of a digital archive that promotes knowledge and discussion of the poetry of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali.
Jane Springer, assistant professor of English, received her Ph.D. in creative writing from Florida State University. Her first book, Dear Blackbird, won the Agha Shahid Ali prize for poetry (University of Utah Press, 2007). Other honors she's received include Pushcart nominations, an AWP Intro Award, a “best emerging writer” award from the CLMP, and the Robert Penn Warren prize for poetry. She is a current recipient for an NEA fellowship and you may read more about her on the NEA’s “Writer’s Corner” at: http://www.arts.gov/features/Writers/index.html. Her academic interests include Southern literature, contemporary poetry, and poetics.
Nathaniel Strout joined the Hamilton faculty in 1981 after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He teaches and studies the literature of the English Renaissance, in particular the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Strout has published articles on poems and court masques by Ben Jonson, on John Ford's play, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and on the idea of mutuality in Shakespeare's As You Like It. He is a contributor to Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet, published by the Modern Language Association. Strout served as associate dean of faculty from 1992-1996. He served as the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Professor from 2005 to 2008.
Katherine H. Terrell, assistant professor of English, received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2005, after earning graduate degrees from the University of Toronto and Oxford University. She specializes in Middle English and Middle Scots literature, and her work has appeared in The Chaucer Review, Studies in Philology and Romance Quarterly, and in Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain (ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 2008); in addition, Terrell is the co-editor of Scotland and the Shaping of Identity in Medieval Britain (Palgrave, 2012). She was recently a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Terrell’s current project examines how the poetic and historical discourses of medieval Scotland create a nationalist discourse through their responses to English writings. Her teaching interests include Old English, Chaucer, women's writing and medieval Christian depictions of Muslims and Jews.
Margaret Thickstun, who received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, is the author of Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Cornell U Press, 1988) and Milton's Paradise Lost: Moral Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) as well as articles on Milton, Bunyan, Swift, Puritan women's spirituality, Puritan clergymen's arguments about childbearing, and seventeenth-century women's arguments for their religious authority. Thickstun's teaching interests include religious literature, as well as questions relating to history of the book and literary reception – the transition from manuscript to print culture, books as physical objects, the place of women writers, the making and role of anthologies, the making of a canon. Her favorite non-seventeenth-century writers are Jane Austen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.B. Yeats and Robert Frost.
Benjamin Widiss specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature and film. He is the author of Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Stanford UP, 2011), which traces developing strategies of authorial self-inscription and -occlusion, and their implications for the process of reading, in novels, memoirs and films over the last century. Widiss is working on a second book, Flirting with Embodiment: Textual Metaphors and Textual Presences in Contemporary Narrative, which explores a constellation of relationships between mass production and individual bodily presence, conceptions of temporality and loss, and constructions of adolescence and maturity as a means to articulate the aesthetic postures of an emergent post-postmodernism. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Yale University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley; Widiss taught previously at Princeton University.
Steven Yao, professor of English, earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at Ohio State University from 1997 to 2002. Yao is the author of two books, Translation and the Languages of Modernism (Palgrave/St. Martins, 2002) and Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford, 2010) which in April was selected by the Association for Asian American Studies for its Book Award in Literary Studies.
He is also co-editor of Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota 2008), Pacific Rim Modernisms (Toronto 2009), and Ezra Pound and Education (2012). Yao’s academic interests include literary translation, poetry, modernist literature, Asian American literature and cross-cultural poetics. In 2012 he was awarded an ACE Fellowship for the 2012-13 academic year. In 2005 Yao was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and he also served as a Stanford Humanities Center External Junior Faculty Fellow for 2005-06.
Back to English overview.
A recent national survey found Hamilton to be one of just two liberal arts colleges nationwide to offer exemplary instruction in writing — not just in English, but across all disciplines and departments.
The English Department balances specialized study and breadth of knowledge. We teach the entire history of literary expression in English, from medieval to postcolonial as well as African-American and Asian-American literatures.
Many English faculty members work collaboratively with students on research projects and publications. Projects are often funded by grants from the Emerson and Freeman foundations.
In addition to being committed to classroom education, members of the English Department regularly earn national recognition for their scholarship. The Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Stanford Humanities Center have all honored Hamilton’s English faculty in recent years.
A recent national survey found Hamilton to be one of just two liberal arts colleges nationwide to offer exemplary instruction in writing — not just in English, but across all disciplines and departments.
The English Department balances specialized study and breadth of knowledge. We teach the entire history of literary expression in English, from medieval to postcolonial as well as African-American and Asian-American literatures.
Many English faculty members work collaboratively with students on research projects and publications. Projects are often funded by grants from the Emerson and Freeman foundations.
In addition to being committed to classroom education, members of the English Department regularly earn national recognition for their scholarship. The Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Stanford Humanities Center have all honored Hamilton’s English faculty in recent years.
A recent national survey found Hamilton to be one of just two liberal arts colleges nationwide to offer exemplary instruction in writing — not just in English, but across all disciplines and departments.
The English Department balances specialized study and breadth of knowledge. We teach the entire history of literary expression in English, from medieval to postcolonial as well as African-American and Asian-American literatures.
Many English faculty members work collaboratively with students on research projects and publications. Projects are often funded by grants from the Emerson and Freeman foundations.
In addition to being committed to classroom education, members of the English Department regularly earn national recognition for their scholarship. The Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Stanford Humanities Center have all honored Hamilton’s English faculty in recent years.
A recent national survey found Hamilton to be one of just two liberal arts colleges nationwide to offer exemplary instruction in writing — not just in English, but across all disciplines and departments.
The English Department balances specialized study and breadth of knowledge. We teach the entire history of literary expression in English, from medieval to postcolonial as well as African-American and Asian-American literatures.
Many English faculty members work collaboratively with students on research projects and publications. Projects are often funded by grants from the Emerson and Freeman foundations.
In addition to being committed to classroom education, members of the English Department regularly earn national recognition for their scholarship. The Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Stanford Humanities Center have all honored Hamilton’s English faculty in recent years.
