Academic Programs

Faculty

 

Erin Carlston

Erin G. Carlston is an Associate Professor of English. She received her Ph.D. (1995) in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford, and her A.B. (1985) in English from Harvard. She joined the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of English faculty in 1999, where she teaches a wide range of courses in twentieth century literature.

In 2003, she offered the first course the English Department has ever listed in Jewish-American literature, now a regular part of the curriculum; the class focused on questions about Jewish identity in the 20th century and how it relates to gender, class, and sexuality. Professor Carlston's research concentrates on the intersections of comparative modernisms, sexuality studies, and Jewish studies. She is the author of Thinking Fascism (1998), which examines the relationship of 1930s women intellectuals to fascism, and has also written articles on Marcel Proust, Paul Celan, Mary Renault, and Audre Lorde, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript called Double Agents, on literary responses to espionage trials involving Jews, homosexual men, and/or communists; the first part of this work treats Proust's reaction to the infamous Dreyfus Affair in France, and the last part will look at the Rosenberg trial and Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Angels in America."

Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
JWST 49/ENGL 49. “American Jewish Literature.”