FULL-TIME FACULTY
MAJOR PUBLICATIONS AND AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION

James P. Bednarz, Professor, Ph.D. Columbia—Shakespeare, Renaissance, Critical Theory—Winner of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching; Winner of the Trustees’ Award for Scholarship for an Individual Work; Author of Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (Introduction and Chapter 2 reprinted in Elizabethan Drama, ed. Harold Bloom), “Marlowe and the English Literary Scene” in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, “Biographical Politics: Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Oldcastle Controversy,” “Between Collaboration and Rivalry: Marston and Dekker’s Coactive Poetics,”  “Shakespeare on Time,” “William Kemp” in Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History,” “John Marston” in The Dictionary of Literary Biography,” “Writing and Revenge: John Marston’s Histriomastix,” “Marston’s Subversion of Shakespeare and Jonson: Histriomastix and the War of the Theaters,” “The Collaborator as Thief: Ralegh’s (Re)Vision of The Faerie Queene,” “Representing Jonson: Histriomastix and the Origin of the Poets’ War,” “Shakespeare’s Purge of Jonson: The Literary Context of Troilus and Cressida,” “Ralegh in Spenser’s Historical Allegory,” “Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Edmund Spenser, the English Undertaker,” and “The Dual Language of Paul Klee’s Symbolic Language”;  Editor of “Shakespeare” and “Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature” for volume 5 of The Critical Temper.

Isaac Cates, Assistant Professor, Ph.D. Yale—Poetry as a Genre, American Poetry, Graphic Novel—Director of Poetry Center—Author of the Interview “A Conversation with Rachel Hadas”; Author of “Louise Glück: Interstices and Silences,” “Dan Clowes versus Spider-Man: Eightball #23,” and encyclopedia articles on Seamus Heaney, Mary Jo Salter, Richard Wilbur, Robert Pinsky, and Robert Frost, among others; Author of poetry The Southwest Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Yale Literary Magazine, and Schuylkill; Author of The Graphic Novel: How Comics Grew Up (forthcoming, Yale U. P.); Co-Author with Mike Wenthe of comics in Backwards City Review and Other, Co-Author with Chad Davidson of “Ouija, Canoe, Haiku: a Collaborative Inquiry into Collaborative Poetry.”  isaac.cates@liu.edu

Arthur Coleman, Professor, Ph.D. N.Y.U.—American Literature, American Studies—Author of Epic and Romance Criticism, “Hemingway’s The Spanish Earth,” “The Americanization of H. G. Wells,” “Sociocultural Inferences from the Practice of Naming America’s Major League Ball Parks,” and the novels A Case in Point and Petals on a Wet Black Bough; Co-Author of Drama Criticism; Co-Compiler with Hildy Neel of Great Stories of World War II: A Researcher’s Guide to the War’s Personal Narratives Published 1940-1946.

Joan Digby, Professor, Ph.D. N.Y.U.—Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Romantic Period, Art and Literature—Director of the Honors Program—Winner of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching; Author of Peterson’s Guide to Honors Programs in American Colleges and Universities, “Philosophy in the Kitchen; or, Problems in Eighteenth-Century Culinary Aesthetics,” “Reading Goya’s Dispartes,” “Korean Students in the American University,”and the poetry book A Sound of Feathers; Co-Author with John Digby of The Collage Handbook; Co-Editor with John Digby of Permutations, Food for Thought, and Inspired by Drink. joan.digby@liu.edu

Phyllis T. Dircks, Professor, Ph.D. N.Y.U.—Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature, Drama—Winner of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching; Winner of the Trustees’ Award for Scholarship for Lifetime Achievement; Author of The Eighteenth-Century English Burletta, David Garrick, American Puppetry, and Two Burlettas of Kane O’Hara; Author of “The Eclectic Comic Genius of John Rich in The Necromancer,” “Shakespeare’s Use of Catch as Dramatic Metaphor,”  “Steinbeck’s Statement on the Inner Chapters of The Grapes of Wrath,” “London’s Stepchild Finds a Home: English Musical Drama in Eighteenth-Century America,” “James Robinson Planche and the English Burletta Tradition,” “The Dramatic Structure of ‘Love’s Alchymie,’” “Musical Drama and the Artistic Whole: The Necessity for Special Criteria,” “The Poet and the Astronomer: Aspects of Holmes’ Satiric Technique,” “Howdy Doody in the Courtroom: A Puppet Custody Case,” “The Treasures of the Ballad Institute and Museum of Puppetry,” and “David Garrick, George III, and the Politics of Revision”; Editor of Midas: An English Burletta, American Puppetry, and American Society for Theatre Research Newsletter.
On the Executive Board of the Theatre Library Association of America. phyllis.dircks@liu.edu

Thomas Fahy, Ph.D., University of North Carolina Chapel Hill—American Studies—Author of Freak Shows and the American Imagination, Gabriel García Márques’s Love in the Time of Cholera: A Reader’s Guide, and Night Visions: A Novel of Suspense; Author of “Unsilencing Lesbianism in the Early Fiction of Gayl Jones,” “Athletes, Grammar Geeks, and Porn Stars: The Liberal Education of Sports Night,”“Worn, Damaged Bodies in the Great Depression: FSA Photography and the Fiction of John Steinbeck, Tillie Olsen, and Nathanael West,” “Killer Culture: Classical Music and the Art of Killing in Silence of the Lambs and Se7en.” “‘In Dark Corners’: Masculinity and Art in Tennessee Williams’s Not About Nightingales.,” “The Enslaving Power of Folksong in Jean Toomer’s Cane,” “‘Some Unheard-of Thing’: Freaks, Families, and Coming of Age in The Member of the Wedding” “Dissonant Harmonies: Classical Music and the Problems of Class in Crimes and Misdemeanors.” “Enfreaking War-Injured Bodies: Fallen Soldiers in Propaganda and the Fiction of William Faulkner, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway.” “Iteration as a Form of Narrative Control in Gertrude Stein’s ‘The Good Anna.’” “Exotic Fantasies, Shameful Realities: The Freak Show and Black Bodies in Eudora Welty, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and F. Scott Fitzgerald,” “Filling the Love Vessel: Women and Religion in Philip Roth’s Uncollected Short Fiction,” “Fractured Bodies: Privileging the Incomplete in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion,” and “The Cultivation of Incompatibility: Music as a Leitmotif in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage”;  Editor of Considering Alan Ball: Essays on Sexuality, Death, and America in the Television and Film Writings, Considering Aaron Sorkin: Essays on the Politics, Poetics, and Slight of Hand in the Films and Television Series; Co-Editor with Kimball King of Captive Audience: Prison and Captivity in Contemporary Theater and Peering behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theater. thomas.fahy@liu.edu

Margaret Hallissy, Professor, Ph.D. Fordham—Medieval Literature—Winner of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching; Winner of the Trustees’ Award for Scholarship for an Individual Work; Author of A Companion to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer and Medieval Codes of Conduct; Venomous Woman: Fear of the Female in Literature; Reading Irish-American Fiction: The Hyphenated Self; “Poison Lore and Chaucer’s Pardoner”; “The End of Medieval Literature: The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer”; “Writing a Building: Chaucer’s Knowledge of the Construction Industry and the Language of the Knight’s  Tale”; “Widow-to-Be: May in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale’”; “The She Ape in Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale’”;  “Reading the Plans: The Architectural Drawings in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose”; “‘No Innocent Work’: Theology and Psychology in William Golding’s The Spire”; “‘The Impulse of a Few Words’: Authority, Divided Self, and Language in Mary Gordon’s Final Payments and The Company of Women”; “Rappaccini’s Venomous Beatrice”; and “Marriage, Morality, and Maturity in Updike’s Marry Me.” margaret.hallissy@liu.edu

Katherine C. Hill-Miller, Professor, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Ph.D. Columbia—Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Literature—Dean College of Liberal Arts and Sciences—Winner of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching; Winner of the Trustees’ Award for Scholarship for an Individual Work; Author of From the Lighthouse to Monk’s House: A Guide to Virginia Woolf’s Literary Landscapes, “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father/Daughter Relationship, “Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution,” “The Daughter’s Dependence: Anne Thackeray Richie and William Makepeace Thackeray,” “Leslie Stephen Revisited: A New Fragment of Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Sketch of the Past,’” “My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley und die Tochter als Monster.” katherine.hill-miller@liu.edu

Deborah Lutz, Assistant Professor, PhD, Graduate Center C.U.N.Y.—Victorian—Author of  The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, “Eroticism of the Nineteenth-Century Pirate Poet: Byron, Scott, and Trollope,” “The Dark Brooder and the Haunted Mansion: The Revival of the Gothic Romance in the Twenty-First Century,” “The Secret Rooms of My Secret Life,” “Love as Honesickness: Longing for Transcendental Home in Byron and the Dangerous Lover Narrative,” “The Erotics of Ontology: Failed Presence in Heidegger and the Mass-Market Romance,” “Kafka’s Itinerary: Toward a Writing of Failure,” “Amorous Hair Jewelry,” and “Dandies, Libertines, and Byronic Lovers: Pornography and Erotic Decadence in Nineteenth-Century England”; Author of Introduction to Barnes and Noble edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë and of annotations to the Modern Library Editions of novels by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and Woolf.  Deborah.Lutz@liu.edu

John J. Lutz, Assistant Professor, PhD S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook—Philosophy and Literature, Critical Theory, Marxism, Post-Colonial Literature—Director of the Institute for Humanities, Literature, and Social Justice—Author of “A Rage for Order: Fetishism. Self-Betrayal and Exploitation in The Secret Agent,” “Pessimism, Autonomy, and Commodity Fetishism in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” “Ngugi’s Dialectical Vision: Individualism and Revolutionary Consciousness in A Grain of Wheat,” “That Texas Disease: Commodity Fetishism and Psychic Deprivation in The Hamlet,” “Chichikov’s Chest: Reality, Representation, and Infectious Storytelling in Dead Souls,” “Centaurs and Other Savages: Patriarchy, Hunger, and Fetishism in ‘Falk,’” and “Faulkner’s Parable of the Cave: Ideology and Social Criticism in Light in August.”  John.Lutz@liu.edu

Sheila McDonald, Associate Professor, Ph.D. S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook—Romantic Poetry, African American Literature—Author of “The Impact of Libertinism on Byron’s Don Juan” and several encyclopedia articles on African American literature.

Richard McNabb, Associate Professor, Ph.D. U. Arizona—Rhetoric and Composition—Winner of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching—Author of “Making the Gesture: Graduate Student Submissions and the Expectations of Journal Referees,” “Remapping Medieval Rhetoric: Reading Boethius from a Grassian Perspective,” “Making All the Right Moves: Foucault, Journals, and the Authorization of Discourse,” “Future Perfect: Administrative Work and the Professionalization of Graduate Students,” “Innovations and Compilations: Juan Gil de Zamora’s Dictaminis Epithalamium,” and “To Father Juan, with Love, Bishop Alexander: Juan Gil de Zamora’s Medieval Art of Letters”; Editor of Reading, Writing, and Interpretation; Co-Editor with Belinda Kremer of Collide: Styles Structures and Ideas in Disciplinary Writing. richard.mcnabb@liu.edu

Edmund Miller, Professor, Ph.D. S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook—Earlier Seventeenth Century—Chairman of the Department of English, Graduate Advisor—Winner of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching; Author of Drudgerie Divine: The Rhetoric of God and Man in George Herbert, George Herbert’s Kinships: An Ahnentafel with Annotations, Exercises in Style, the short stories Night Times, and The Go-Go Boy Sonnets: Men of the New York Club Scene and other books of poetry; Editor of Mount-Orgueil: or Divine and Profitable Meditations by William Prynne; Co-Editor of Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert; Author of “Thom. Buck, ‘The Anagram,’ and the Editing of The Temple,” “The Browne Doublet: Religio Medici in the History of English Prose Style,” “Sensual Imagery in the Devotional Poetry of Robert Herrick,” “‘The Late Massacre’: Milton’s Liturgical Sonnet,” “The Godhead of the Son in Paradise Regained,”  “It Thought It Were a Mouse-Trap: The Sylvie and Bruno Books as Archetypal Menippean Satire,”  “The Sylvie and Bruno Books as Victorian Novel,” “Byron’s Moonshine: Alternative Readings in the Ironic Mode,” “Two Approaches to the Nonsense Songs of Edward Lear,” “Renaming Algernon,” “Erato Throws a Curve: Anaïs Nin and the Elusive Feminine Voice in Erotica,” “The Academic Job Market in English, Prospects for Tenure, and Gay Issues,” and other articles. edmund.miller@liu.edu

Suzanne Nalbantian, Professor, Ph.D. Columbia—Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Interdisciplinary Literature and Neuroscience—Winner of the Trustees’ Award for Scholarship both for an Individual Work and for Lifetime Achievement; Author of Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience, Aesthetic Autobiography, The Symbol of the Soul from Hölderlin to Yeats: A Study in Metonymy, and Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel; Author of “Into the House of Myth: From the Real to the Universal, from Singleness to a Variety of Selfhood”and of Time and Memory” for the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature; Editor of Anaïs Nin: Literary Perspectives; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for Independent Study and Research; Has given talks at Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Indiana, Carnegie-Mellon, Pittsburgh, Sorbonne-Paris IV, and other universities and at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Max Planck Institut in Tübingen, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and other laboratories; Member Executive Council of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and permanent member of the Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

Dennis Pahl, Professor,Ph.D. S.U.N.Y. Buffalo—Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature, Critical Theory—Author of Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, “Poe’s Sublimity: The Role of Burkean Aesthetics,” “Ethical Dimensions in James’s Art Criticism; or, Engaging the Other in ‘The Figure in the Carpet,’” “Henry James and the Anxiety of Poe’s Influence: The Example of Roderick Hudson,” “James’s Unintentioned ‘Decentering’ in the Text of The Aspern Papers,” “The Gaze of History in ‘Benito Cereno,’” “De-Composing Poe’s ‘Philosophy,’” “Poe/Script: The Death of the Author in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” “Rediscovering Byron: Poe’s `The Assignation,’” “Framing Poe: Fictions of Self and Self-Containment,” “Going Down with Henry James’s Uptown Girl: Genteel Anxiety and the Promiscuous World of Daisy Miller,” “Lighting Out for the Territory Ahead: Responding Otherwise to the Past,” and “Godard’s Alphaville: A Journey through Filmic Space”; Author of “The Applicant,” “The Mule,” and other short fiction; On the editorial board of The Edgar Allan Poe Review and Confrontation.  dennis.pahl@liu.edu

Wendy Ryden, Assistant Professor, Ph.D. C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center—Rhetoric and Composition—Author of “Conflict and Kitsch: The Politics of Politeness in the Writing Class,” “Bodies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Competing Discourses of Reality and Representation in Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel,” “How Soft is Process? The Feminization of Comp and Pedagogies of Care,” “Montaigne’s Essay and Writing across the Curriculum,” “Interrogating the Monologue: Making Whiteness Visible,” “Assessing Our Assessments,” and “The Divided Self in Lélia.” wendy.ryden@liu.edu

John Scheckter, Professor, Ph.D. Iowa—Australian Literature, American Literature, Post-Colonial Literature—Author of The Australian Novel 1830-1980: A Thematic Introduction, “The Lost Child in Australian Fiction,” “Australia Lost and Founded: Versions of the First Settlement in Two Modern Novels,” “Now That the (Water) Buffalo’s Gone: James Welch and the Transcultural Novel,” “James Welch: Settling Up on the Reservation,” “Peter Nazareth and the Ugandan Expulsion: Pain, Distance, Narration,” “Dreaming Wholeness: David Malouf’s New Stories,” “The Disloyalty of Elizabeth Hay,” “The Broad Arrow: Conventions, Convictions, and Convicts,” “Thomas Savage and the West: Roots of Compulsion,” and “History, Possibility, and Romance in The Pioneers.” john.scheckter@liu.edu

Jonna Semeiks, Associate Professor, Ph.D. Rutgers—Modern British Literature—Author of “Sex, Lawrence, and Videotape,” “Visions of Solitude: D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Sun,’ St. Mawr, and ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’” and “Writing in Response to Reading in the Freshman Composition Course”; Co-Author of “The Goblin Child: Folktale Symbolism in Popular Art” and “Leather-Stocking in ’Nam: Rambo, Platoon, and the American Frontier Myth”; Co-Editor of American Voices: A Thematic/Rhetorical Reader,  Discoveries: Fifty Stories of the Quest and Patterns in Popular Culture; Associate Editor of Confrontation. jonna.semeiks@liu.edu