Emeritus Faculty

Zelda Austen, Ph.D. S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook—Victorian Period, English Novel—Winner of David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching—Author of “Oliver Twist: A Divided View,” “Why Feminist Critics are Angry at George Eliot,” “The Ant and the Grasshopper: William Morris and Oscar Wilde in the Eighties,” “Looking Backward: Edwardian Views of the Victorians,” and “Factories and Fairy Palaces: The Response of Dickens and Others to the Industrial Revolution.”

Melvin Backman, Ph.D. Columbia—American Literature, especially Faulkner and Hemingway; Modern Novel—Author of Faulkner: The Major Years, “Addie Bundren and William Faulkner,” and “Death and Birth in Hemingway.”

Blossom Feinstein, Ph.D. C.U.N.Y.—Comparative Literature, Bible as Literature—Author of “The Faerie Queene and Cosmogonies of the Near East” and other articles.

Martin Greenberg, B.A. Michigan—Modern Literature, especially European—Winner of the Trustees’ Award for Scholarship; Author of Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature and The Hamlet Vocation of Coleridge and Wordsworth; Translator of Heinrich von Kleist’s Marquise of O and Goethe’s Faust; Co-Translator of The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923.

Barbara Horwitz, Professor, Ph.D. S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook—English Novel—Author of Jane Austen and the Question of Women’s Education, British Women Writers 1700-1850: An Annotated Bibliography of Their Works and Works About Them, “Pride and Prejudice and Framley Park: An Interesting Structural Resemblance,” “The Unfit Mother in Lady Susan and The Juvenilia,” and numerous encyclopedia articles.

Norbert A. Krapf, Ph.D. Notre Dame, D.H.L. honoris causa St. Joseph’s College—American Poetry—Long Island University Poet Laureate; Winner of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching; Winner of the Trustees’ Award for Scholarship both for an Individual Work and for Lifetime Achievement; Author of the poetry books Arriving on Paumanok, The Playfair Book of Hours, Lines Drawn from Dürer, Heartwood, A Dream of Plum Blossoms, Circus Songs, Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany, March Songs for an English Half-Moon, East of New York City,  Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins,Bittersweet along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island, and The Country I Came From; Author of the prose poems The Sunday before Thanksgiving; Editor of Under Open Sky: Poets on William Cullen Bryant, and Finding the Grain: Pioneer German Journals and Letters from Dubois County, Indiana, Looking for God’s Country; Translator of Shadows on the Sundial: Selected Early Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke; Editor and Translator of Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia; Author of “The Complications in Making a Book of Poems about Germany,” David Ignatow’s Sense of Community,” “‘What You and I Share’: A Tribute to William Stafford,” “Discovering Lucian Stryk’s Heartland,” “The Poetry of Robert Morgan,” “William Heyen’s Obsessive Ghosts: Erika and the Holocaust,” “John Chiardi and ‘Jabberwocky’ in the Indiana Cornfields,” “William Cullen Bryant’s Roslyn Poems,” “The Poetry of Nancy Willard,” “Walt Whitman in the Black Forest,” “An Invitation to the Country: William Cullen Bryant in Roslyn,” “The Poetry of William Heyen,” “Whitman’s Calamus: From the Garden to the City,” and other articles. www.krapfpoetry.com

Dan Levin, Ph.D. Chicago 1964—Creative Writing, Russian Literature—Author of Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky, Mask of Glory, The Dream in the Flesh, and Son of Judah; Author of the play May Day. dan.levin@liu.edu

Richard Lettis, Ph.D. Yale—The Novel—Author of J. D. Salinger and The Dickens Aesthetic; Co-Editor of Huck Finn and His Critics,The Wuthering Heights Handbook, and The Hungarian Revolution.

Julian Mates, Ph.D. Columbia—Shakespeare, American Theatre—Winner of the Trustees’ Award for Scholarship; Author of American Musical Stage Before 1800, “The John Street Theatre Picture,” and “Macbeth’s Head”; Co-Editor of Renaissance Culture; Editor of four volumes of Plays by William Dunlap, The Musical Works of William Dunlap, and America’s Musical Stage: 200 Years of Musical Theatre.

Sheila McKenna, Associate Professor, Ph.D. Columbia—English as a Second Language—Author of “English Composition Organizational Patterns Influenced by Other Ethnocultural Backgrounds,” “Orientational Prepositions: Cross-Cultural Misinterpretations,” “Identifying and Modifying Organizational Patterns in L2 Writing,” and “Marge Piercy—Poetry & Music.” sheila.mckenna@liu.edu

Yvonne Rodax, Ph.D. NYU—Grammar, Renaissance—Author of The Real and the Ideal in the Novella of Italy, France, and England: Five Centuries of Change in the Boccaccian Tale.

Jean Shields, Ph.D. Indiana—Modern Drama, Women Novelists—Author of  “Lowry’s Consul in Under the Volcano: Portrait of Conrad Aiken.”

Martin Tucker, Ph.D. NYU—Modern Literature, especially World Literature—Author of Joseph Conrad, Africa in Modern Literature, and Sam Shepard; Author of the poetry books While There Is Time: Penultimate Poems, Attention Spans, and Homes of Locks and Mysteries; Editor of Confrontation, The Critical Temper, and Moulton’s Library of Literary Criticism; Co-Editor of A Library of Literary Criticism, Modern Commonwealth Literature, and Belles-Lettres in English.
Phone: 516-299-2720, Fax: 516-299-2735, E-mail: confrontation@liu.edu, Web: http://www.liu.edu/confrontation

Jeanne Welcher, Ph.D. Fordham—Restoration and Eighteenth Century—Author of John Evelyn; Editor of seven volumes of Gulliveriana; Co-Editor of The Diaries, 1871-1882, of Samuel Putnam Avery.