Contact FYS
	300 Steele Building CB# 3504 UNC-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3504 email: fys@unc.edu phone: (919)843-7773

English

Nicholas Allen is Assistant Professor in Irish Literature in the English Department. He is a graduate of Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin; his books are George Russell (Æ) and the New Ireland, 1905-30 (2003) and The cities of Belfast (2003). For more information, see http://english.unc.edu/faculty/allenn.htm.

Daniel Anderson directs the Studio for Instructional Technology and English Studies at Carolina. His interests include teaching writing through the use of emerging communication media such as the World Wide Web and guiding students as they work together to investigate and create resources for studying literature

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English. He has published and lectured widely on slave narratives, African American autobiography, and southern literature. He is co-editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997) and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997). He also is Series Editor of the North American Slave Narratives electronic library.

Christopher Armitage earned degrees from Oxford, Western Ontario, and Duke. He joined the UNC faculty in 1967 and has received a Standard Oil Foundation award for Inspirational Teaching (1973); the Nicholas Salgo Outstanding Teacher Award (1981); a Bowman and Gordon Gray Chair for Teaching Award (1986); and in 1995 was named the first University Professor of Distinguished Teaching. Since 1969 he has taken UNC students and alumni on summer programs in England, focusing on Shakespeare in Performance. He is also a keen student of tennis and delights in beating graduate students on the court.

Laurence Avery, former chairman of the English department, has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in modern drama for a number of years, and recently inaugurated a course in playwriting in the department's Creative Writing program. He has published widely on American drama, most recently concentrating on the North Carolina writer Paul Green and the African-American writer James Weldon Johnson.

Inger Sigrun Brodey, Director of Undergraduate Studies in Comparative Literature, was born in Japan and immigrated from Denmark. She loves teaching cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary courses here at UNC and has won a Tanner award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She has published on Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Natsume Sôseki. Her current research is on connections between Meiji Japan and post-Enlightenment Europe, particularly involving the connection between Natsume Sôseki and Jane Austen, as well as a book on Cowboys and Samurai in Film.

Erin G. Carlston did her doctoral work in France and at Stanford University, where she also taught for several years. She was brought to the English Department at Chapel Hill as a specialist in early 20th century British and U.S. American literature, but seems to teach everything from Homer to postmodernism. When not hunting down 1920s antiques, she chips away at a very long book on Proust.

Pamela Cooper received her B.A. at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, where she also taught. She received both her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto. She joined the UNC faculty in 1990. In the English department, she teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and theory. Her research interests are the contemporary novel, critical theory, postcolonial and gender studies.

Tyler Curtain is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. He holds a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Professor Curtain is the 2009 Recipient of the J. Carlyle Sitterson Freshman Teaching Award for recognition of excellence in freshman teaching by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Maria DeGuzmán is assistant professor of Latina/o Literature(s) in the English department. She obtained her BA from Brown University and her MA and Ph.D. from Harvard. Her areas of research range from contemporary U.S. Latina/o literature and theory to visual studies and the relation between photography and other forms of "writing," that is, between photography and story writing. She is also a conceptual photographer and the photo-text work she produces collaboratively with Dr. Jill H. Casid under the name SPIR: Conceptual Photography has been exhibited internationally.

Connie Eble, Professor of English, has been a faculty member at the University for 37 years. She is a linguist by training, and her teaching and research focus on the structure and history of the English language.  She is currently working on a project on bilingualism in antebellum Louisiana using the Prudhomme Family Papers in the Southern Historical Collection. Dr. Eble is a long-time teacher of expository writing and served for 10 years as Editor of the journal American Speech.

Rebecka Rutledge Fisher regularly teaches seminars having to do with matters of cross-cultural poetics. The author of a number of essays on W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, she has also published an edition of Olaudah Equiano’s 18th century autobiography. She is interested in comparative literature of the African diaspora, as well as African American and American studies. Her research areas include the Francophone Caribbean literatures of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Currently, she is at work on two book projects: an edited collection of critical essays on the work of the cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, and a book-length study titled Metaphor and Modernity: Studies in the Poetics of African American Literature.

Joseph M. Flora earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. He has published books and articles on American and British literature, mainly in the modern period. His primary interest is twentieth-century American literature, with emphasis on literature of the American South and the American West, the short story, and Ernest Hemingway. He is co-advisor of the Association of English Majors. He keeps an eye on the college athletic scene--and certainly Carolina basketball. His private recreational sport is swimming.

Laura Halperin is an Assistant Professor of Latina/o Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University and M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  After college, she taught fourth-sixth grade Spanish and sixth grade English. After graduate school, she had a Carolina Postdoctoral  Fellowship for Faculty Diversity. She is currently writing a book about Latina deviance and defiance in late twentieth century Latina literature. She is also interested in coming of age Latina/o narratives and Latinas/os' experiences with the U.S. educational system.

William Harmon, who has degrees from the University of Chicago, UNC-CH, and the University of Cincinnati, is the James Gordon Hanes Professor in the Humanities and serves on the faculty of the Department of English and the Program in Comparative Literature. Since coming to UNC-CH in 1970 he has taught more than thirty different undergraduate and graduate courses in literature, composition, and creative writing. He has published five books of original poetry, including winners of the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets and the
William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Light Verse and a number of anthologies, CD ROMs, and online projects sponsored by Columbia University Press, including The Classic Hundred Poems and The Top 500 Poems. Since 1984 he has been the editor of A Handbook to Literature (5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th editions, 9th forthcoming in 2002). He has published scholarly articles in many journals, including PMLA and The American Anthropologist as well as notes, essays, and reviews.
In 1999 he received the Robert B Heilman Award given by the Sewanee Review for excellence in book-reviewing.

Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English. She earned her B.A. from the historically black Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, where she specialized in African American Literature and Folklore. She regularly teaches in these areas, with special emphases upon the works of post-1950 African American women writers. Among her eighteen authored and edited books is the recently published The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Randall Kenan, and Gloria Naylor (1996). In the fall of 1999, she studied Spanish just because she wanted to learn the language--and she travels a lot in Spain. The 2000 winner of the William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching, she celebrated by attending the ACC Tournament in Charlotte in March. And she loves tennis enough to allow any of her students to beat her. She is currently reading the "Left Behind" series.

Jennifer Ho, a transplanted Californian by way of New England, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she teaches classes in contemporary American and Asian American literature.  Her current research project, “What ARE You?”: Racial Ambiguity in Contemporary Asian American Culture, looks at the theme of racial ambiguity in film, literature, popular culture and new media (blogs) as it pertains to mixed-race Asian American subjects in the post-civil rights era.

Jordynn Jack is an assistant professor in the Department of English, where she specializes in rhetoric and composition. In particular, her research focuses on women's rhetorics and the rhetoric of science. Although she is originally from Canada, she enjoys living in North Carolina, and hopes this course helps her learn more about Southern women's history and writing. In her spare time, she enjoys knitting, reading, camping, fitness, and travel.

Joy Kasson teaches American Studies, a field that emphasizes the connections between history, literature, the arts, and culture in the United States. Her special interests include art and photography, film, and literature of all kinds. She had just finished a book about Buffalo Bill's Wild West, which will play a
small part in this seminar. The winner of several teaching awards, she has two children, one just starting college and the other getting ready to begin medical school. She enjoys the performing arts and travel, including most recently trips to California, the Canadian Rockies, Italy and Northern Ireland.

Robert G. Kirkpatrick, Jr. received his undergraduate degree from Erskine College and his graduate degrees in English from Harvard. He teaches British Romanticism as well as poetry writing in the English Department and the Creative Writing Program. He has won various teaching awards including a Bowman and Gordon Gray chair (1995-1998), and is currently editing a diary kept by the future Poet Laureate Robert Southey during a sojourn in Portugal in 1795. He is an Advisor in the Honors Program and is Director of the London Summer Honors Seminar on Great Works of the European Tradition. He and his wife have lived in Chapel Hill since 1967. Their son Robert graduated from UNC in 1993 in Classics, and their daughter Pamela is currently a junior at UNC majoring in Art History.

Laurie Langbauer is a professor of English. Her books are on the British novel and critical theory; she also teaches autobiography and the personal essay. She will be an Ethics Fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. She has been meeting with first year students in small seminars for over twenty-five years now. She's been reading children literature for much longer than that.

George Lensing has been in the English department at UNC-CH for 32 years, teaching courses in twentieth-century British and American poetry. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Louisiana State University and spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Brazil. He has been Associate Dean of Honors and Secretary of the Faculty. He won a Tanner Teaching Award in1984.

John McGowan teaches courses in Victorian literature, literary theory, and cultural studies. He is the author of one book on Victorian literature and of three books on the intersection of art, culture, and democracy. This seminar reflects his on-going interest in how Western culture responds to the decline of traditional sources of authority and the rise of democracy, with Nietzsche representing the anti-democratic pole and James the pro-democracy alternative, while Pater and Wilde fall somewhere in-between.

Jeanne Moskal specializes in travel literature and in the British Romantic Period. She has authored Blake, Ethics, and Forgiveness and edited Mary Shelley’ travel books for the standard edition of her works. She is working on a book on travel books and the politics of the Napoleonic Wars and won a Lilly Endowment Grant to do research on women missionaries as travel writers at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She is the President of the International Society of Travel Writing and the founder of the Discussion Group on Travel Literature of the Modern Language Association.

Thomas Reinert regularly teaches courses on contemporary American literature and 18th-century British literature and has also written articles and reviews about them. He has been teaching in the UNC English Department since 1996.

Thomas Stumpf, who has sweated through St. Louis summers, has sung with a rock and roll band in hot, smoky cellars, and has sat through stifling committee meetings in which the hot air was blowing furiously, has never, in his many years of doing and teaching, actually paid a visit to hell itself. He will be content to do so vicariously and in your company and swears by his antique learning and his many teaching awards that all will return safely and untortured.

Beverly Taylor, Professor of English, has special interest in nineteenth-century, modern, and medieval literature about King Arthur and courtly love. She is currently writing a book about the women of Camelot which discusses paintings and other visual art along with literature (and is also working on another book about Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning). Around these projects, she travels and takes care of peacocks, ducks, guinea fowl, a parakeet, a cat, and two dobermans.

Todd Taylor's earliest research examined scholarly writing and publication and resulted in two coedited collections: Writing and Publishing for Academic Authors (Rowman & Littlefield) and Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition (SUNY Press). My more recent work investigates how concepts of literacy are changing in response to advanced communication technologies. In 1998, I coedited Literacy Theory after the Internet (Columbia University Press) with Irene Ward. I am currently working with my coauthor, Janice Walker, on a second edition of The Columbia Guide to Online Style. I have been the editor of CCC Online since its launch in 1998. I also edit the The CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric: 1984 to 1999, which is now available as an online, searchable database.

James Thompson is the former Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and author of numerous books and articles on eighteenth-century English literature from Congreve to Austen. His work can be viewed as a kind of a historical sociology of culture with a focus on the conditions of cultural exchange in the early modern period that would make potential readers susceptible and receptive to the kind of fiction we have come to call the novel.

Jane F. Thrailkill is assistant professor of English and American Literature at Chapel Hill. As an undergraduate at Amherst College, she originally planned to attend medical school but was tempted away from this career path by outstanding literature teachers. Dr. Thrailkill, who earned her Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins, brings to bear her interest in both literature and medicine in her teaching and in the book
she is currently writing, which examines the connections between writing and healing in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, and other American authors.

Born in New Delhi, India, Rashmi Varma is an Assistant Professor in the English Department, and came to UNC in 1998. She received her BA and MA from the University of Delhi, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She loves Indian classical music, American presidential elections, and doing her tiny bit for a more just and humane world.

Linda Wagner-Martin (PhD, Bowling Green State University) is Hanes Professor of English. She has written biographies of Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, and the Fitzgeralds, and many essays and books about literature, mostly American and mostly modern authors such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Morrison, Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Edith Wharton. She likes basketball and students with imaginations.

An associate professor of English Literature who specializes in the literature of the English Renaissance, Jessica Wolfe has taught at Carolina since 1998, during which time she has won three teaching awards including the William Friday award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Her first book, on technology in the English Renaissance, is due out from Cambridge University Press in Spring 2004, and she is currently working on a study of the reception of Homer during the Renaissance. In addition to teaching courses in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, Professor Wolfe also teaches in the department of Comparative Literature, where she teaches French, Italian, Spanish, and neo-Latin literature.
A native Manhattanite, Professor Wolfe studied at Bryn Mawr College and at Stanford University, and she currently lives in Durham with her husband - also a member of UNC's English department - and her two dachshunds.