For advisors and Students: English writing program courses for Spring 2016.
All of the courses below focus on working intensively on student writing at levels appropriate for – and
challenging to - students’ current academic writing proficiency. But each of them is taught with different
themes and texts, by professors with different intellectual styles and interests. In order that students can
choose the course which will be most inspiring and valuable to them, we offer here a little bit of information
– first about the course contents, and then about the Professors.
If you have any questions, do get in touch with Geoff Gilbert, the chair of the department of Comparative
Literature and English (ggilbert@aup.edu), or with Cary Hollinshead-Strick, who runs the writing program
(cstrick@aup.edu).
•
EN1000 A
Principles of Academic Writing: On Conflict
Professor: Brenton Hobart
Schedule MWR 09:00-10:20
Conflict is as recurrent in history, and in our daily lives, as love, death or happiness. And like them, it can be
studied thematically through infinite approaches. Through a list of novels and films, students will think and
write critically about various forms of conflict including personal, racial and social struggles, psychological
illness and the battle to know oneself, the fight against time, the fight against fascism, the fight for, or against,
socialism and capitalism, and war. This course is designed to help students develop and expand their skills in
writing structured academic essays in English. Emphasis will be placed on thinking analytically, planning and
organizing essays, the importance of word choice, stylistic variation and editing. Texts will include: Hemingway,
For Whom the Bell Tolls; Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; Orwell, 1984, and Morrison, Beloved.
EN1000B
Principles of Academic Writing: On Conflict
Professor: Brenton Hobart
Schedule MWR 12:10-13:30
Conflict is as recurrent in history, and in our daily lives, as love, death or happiness. And like them, it can be
studied thematically through infinite approaches. Through a list of novels and films, students will think and
write critically about various forms of conflict including personal, racial and social struggles, psychological
illness and the battle to know oneself, the fight against time, the fight against fascism, the fight for, or against,
socialism and capitalism, and war. This course is designed to help students develop and expand their skills in
writing structured academic essays in English. Emphasis will be placed on thinking analytically, planning and
organizing essays, the importance of word choice, stylistic variation and editing. Texts will include: Hemingway,
For Whom the Bell Tolls; Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus; Orwell, 1984, and Morrison, Beloved.
EN1000C
Principles of Academic Writing: Language Varieties in Literature
Professor: Rebekah Rast
Schedule T 09:00-10:20, F 09:00-11:55
We often speak of languages, dialects and accents. Dialects and accents can also be referred to as “varieties”.
Within the study of languages, varieties can be viewed in terms of the individual – all speakers and writers of a
language speak and write in their own idiosyncratic way – and varieties can also be studied within and
between speech communities (for example, high and low German, or les patois in dominantly French-speaking
regions). These varieties are closely linked to the cultures and traditions of their societies. In this course we
will read novels, short stories and articles in which authors make use of different varieties that we may (or
may not) be accustomed to reading or hearing. We will discuss these varieties, how the authors use them in
their writing, what we can learn from their use of these varieties, and how stories told in these varieties hold
up over time and continue to reflect relationships and challenges in our multilingual world. In-class discussion
and your own reflection will generate original writing. We will experiment with the use of prose, journalistic
writing and academic essay writing, while always working towards developing your own voice in written
English.
•
EN1010A
College Writing: Awakenings, Between Innocence and Experience
Professor: Roy Rosenstein
Schedule TF 16:55-18:15
This semester we will read American and English authors, with one French woman writer studied in a
bilingual edition. Their works represent life as a series of awakenings, sometimes premature (Hemingway,
selected short stories) and sometimes long overdue (Malory, Morte Darthur), but too often failed (Crane,
selected short stories) or incomplete (Labé, Sonnets). We will look at how some fictional characters and
various poetic voices may awaken to birth and death (Hemingway), to love or its absence (James, Daisy Miller),
to all of our private identities (Labe), to an awareness of social struggles (Blake, Songs of Innocence and
Experience), and ultimately to idealized codes of collective conduct (Crane, Malory).
EN1010B
College Writing: The Writer’s World
Professor: Adrian Harding
Schedule TF 12:10-13:30
When we read, we often have the impression of entering a different world, of travelling in an unknown country
where some things are familiar, others strange and new, some riddled with conflicting desires, others defined by
unmoving law. Mythmakers and writers have played with the notion of the Creation of the world since time
immemorial, each new work being, in its own way, a genesis of reality. Within this ‘world’, notions of what is
normal and what is abnormal are at the heart of our experience of reading, as of our experience of life. The texts
on our course range from representations of the ‘normal’ to representations of the perverse, sometimes inverted
one in the guise of the other. We shall analyse different literary 'worlds' from different cultural and historical
worlds, so that we can develop a critical approach to diverse texts, respecting their specificity and trying to define
what is common among them. Historically we move from one of the great theatrical representations of human
frailty, Shakespeare’s King Lear, staging itself as a disturbing dislocation of the world and the mind, of the very
idea of “nature”, to Xavier de Maistre’s playfully profound conversation with himself, Voyage Around My Room
(1794), announcing the inwardness and ironic solitude of nineteenth century Romanticism. We enter the surreal,
grotesque and poignant world of Russia’s encounter with modernity, in Nikolai Gogol’s Stories from the 1830s,
and in Gogol’s best interpreter, Nabokov, staging the hilarious and pitiful exploits of a Russian professor in
American exile in his short comic masterpiece Pnin (1957). We end with three very different explorations of life
in the twentieth century: the Iranian surrealist Sadegh Hedayat’s ironic, lyrical tales Three Drops of Blood, bringing
to mind a kind of Persian Kafka; the limpid, haunting subtleties found in the brief, inimitable Palm of the Hand
Stories of the great Japanese writer Kawabata; we end with the deceptively casual freedoms of the great American
poet Frank O’Hara, in his Selected Poems, cut short by his accidental death in 1966.
EN1010C
College Writing: Ideas of the Other
Professor: David Tresilian
Schedule TF 13:45-15:05
This course looks at ideas of self and other as these are expressed in selected literary texts. It starts with ideas
of otherness, sexual and cultural, as expressed in a major work of ancient Greek tragedy, Euripides’s Medea,
before moving on to the representation of cultural and racial otherness in Shakespeare’s Othello, one of the
English Renaissance dramatist’s four major tragedies. The course examines how the other or outsider can be
seen as at once seductive and disruptive, forcing a reconsideration of hierarchies of sex and power. Longer
prose works read in the course, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Stoker’s Dracula, examine the possibilities and
anxieties associated with the opening up of the wider world. While Defoe is writing during the heroic phase
of early capitalist expansion, his lonely protagonist exploiting and reordering the non-European world,
Stoker’s wildly popular horror novel dramatizes late-Victorian anxieties of invasion in lurid and melodramatic
terms. Freud’s ‘Fragment of a Study of Hysteria,’ his case of Dora, probes otherness within, raising the
possibility that all of us, for the psychoanalyst, are ultimately strangers to ourselves. Finally, Tayeb Salih’s
Season of Migration to the North, an Arab rewriting of themes from Othello, reverses the gaze of Shakespeare’s
play in a twentieth-century tale of otherness at home and abroad.
EN1010D
College Writing: Masks and Disguises
Professor: Kevin Kennedy
Schedule MR 15:20-16:40
Masks and disguises have always played a key role in cultural practices, from ancient rituals to medieval carnivals
to modern superhero films. While a mask is conventionally seen as a tool for concealment and deception, it
may also function as a challenge to established notions of identity and social hierarchy. The varied and
ambiguous reactions a mask can produce (fear and uncertainty, but also laughter and enchantment) have made
it a favoured literary device for the exploration of the tension between inside and outside, private and social,
the self and its other. In this course we will we look at some of the ways masks and disguises have been used,
either literally or metaphorically, in a range of texts from the Renaissance to the present day. Works to be
studied include Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and some shorter texts by
Auster, Poe, Schnitzler and Hawthorne. We will consider questions such as: What is the connection between
the mask and the self it hides? How do disguises establish and/or subvert our understanding of identity and
selfhood? Is human civilization merely a mask hiding more sinister truths? Against this thematic background
students will be able to develop and improve their reading and writing skills, learn to distinguish between
different genres of writing and to appreciate them in their specific historical and cultural contexts.
EN1010E
College Writing: Hell
Professor: Sneharika Roy
Schedule MR 13:45-15:05
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani described New York City after the Twin Towers attack as “Hell, what Dante must
have meant when he described Hell.” Giuliani’s words reflect a moving paradox: when we are confronted
with horror and suffering of such magnitude that it simply cannot be expressed or described, we turn to the analogy
of hell. The focus of this course will therefore be on the representation of hell not simply as a “place,” but as
one of most profound and powerful metaphors of human civilisation. Surprisingly, political history will be at
the heart of our explorations as we examine the medieval power struggle between the Church and the Italian
city-states in Dante’s Inferno and the tussle between monarchical and republican ideologies in Milton’s Paradise
Lost and Melville’s Moby Dick. Indian and existential philosophy will inform our discussions of Jean-Paul
Sartre’s existential hell in “No Exit” and Mulk Raj Anand’s depiction of Indian soldiers fighting during World
War One in Across the Black Water. This course is therefore situated at the crossroads of philosophy, politics,
comparative religion, and literature. Its transdisciplinary and transhistorical approaches will also be
supplemented by transcultural investigations. The levels of Dante’s Inferno are comparable to library shelves in
their systematic, albeit aestheticised, compilation of the existing Greco-Roman, Christian, and Islamic
knowledge available to Humanist Europe. Milton’s Christian hell is equally indebted to “pagan” sources.
Anand fuses Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian imaginaries. Thus, as we trace imaginative reconstructions of hell
through pagan, Christian, and secular sources, we will discover that far from being an “original” cultural
creation, hell is, in fact, “co-created” across periods and cultures. In this sense, hell is much more than a
creepy hall of horrors—it is a fundamental part of our religious, philosophical, cultural, and above all, human
heritage.
EN1010F
College Writing: Stories of the Self
Professor: David Tresilian
Schedule: TF 15:20-16:40
‘What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and moving how
express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension how like a god.’ Hamlet’s famous words
from Shakespeare’s play express early modern optimism about human possibilities, ironically placing them in
the mouth of one of the English dramatist’s most self-conflicted protagonists. This course will look at Hamlet
and a range of other works with Hamlet’s self-questioning in mind. Who am I? What am I? What kinds of
relationship do I have with others? Even with myself? It starts with Sophocles’s Antigone, a major work of
ancient Greek tragedy having much to say about the social and moral bonds that constitute the self. Hamlet
introduces the great liberal theme of self and society, separating private conscience from public roles and
looking at the range of selves routinely presented to others. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written against the
background of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the growth of the factory system, poses the question
of human possibilities anew, this time in terms of a scientific experiment outside moral bounds. Major works
from European modernism – Freud’s ‘Fragment of a Study of Hysteria,’ Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – present new ways of writing about the self, whether in terms of
psychoanalysis, ‘stream of consciousness’, or against the background of breakneck political and social change.
•
EN2020A
Writing and Criticism: Confinement and Flight
Professor: Roy Rosenstein
Schedule TF 15:20-16:40
This section proposes extensive readings and intensive analyses in representative monuments of our Western
literary heritage, from Classical Greece to modern North and South America. We will examine ways in which
our authors’ perceptions of external and internal limitations have influenced their presentation of the human
condition: fate (moira) in Homer (Iliad) and Sophocles (Oedipus the King), the body in Plato (four dialogues) and
Apuleius (The Golden Ass), societal roles and moral standards in Lazarillo de Tormes and Shakespeare (Richard
II), family conflict and prejudice in Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), and ultimately the nature of narrative
and the world at large in Borges (Labyrinths). In so doing we will chart the encounter between the dread of
constraint and the drama of freedom. Lecture and discussion each week focus on universal themes, such as
the growth of the individual, the heroic ideal, the development of myth, the writing of history, man and
woman in society, and the conflict of love and honor.
EN2020B
Writing and Criticism: Conflict and Transformation
Professor: Adrian Harding
Schedule TF 13:45-15:05
Conflict is considered primordial and necessary to creation in many cultural myths, despite the absence of any
trace of warfare in certain ancient societies. Early twentieth-century anthropologists, for example, argued that the
root and essence of theatre is not just agon as (Athenian) ‘competition’ but also as ‘strife’; but this view has since
been challenged by others who see creative or constructive transformation as the raison d’être of performance.
Conflicting psychoanalytic and philosophical views of the unconscious also pit conflictual against constructivist
paradigms; the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was notably dissatisfied with the Freudian model of the
unconscious as an Oedipal “theatre” perpetually enacting primal conflict. In literature, the aesthetics and ethics
of irony often express conflict with the creative power of wonder, the known setting limits on the definition or
recognition of the unknown, and on the very possibility of creating new meaning, let alone a new way of living.
The texts on our course cover several types or fields of this problem, from Homer’s exhilarating founding
narrative of constancy, change and becoming in The Odyssey, through Shakespeare’s dark, anarchic twist on the
conflict of moral, political and sexual imaginations in Measure for Measure, up to the modern period with its
ostensibly more familiar visions of psychic, moral, existential and military conflict. We will read two supreme
examples of the tension between irony and compassion in the short stories of Chekhov and Joyce, where the
reader’s desire and ability to judge, to enter into conflict with conflicted protagonists, are beautifully and
imperceptibly subdued, even entirely laid to rest. We then look at two texts framed in the history of the First
World War, the short story collection Women, Men and the Great War and the masterpiece of comic irony, Italo
Svevo’s 1923 novel Zeno’s Conscience. We finish with a classic novel of queer identity, Giovanni’s Room (1956) by
the black American author James Baldwin, whose homosexual and bisexual themes, playing out unstably among
(mostly) white protagonists, place conflict at its heart, with transformation a step away.
EN2020C
Writing and Criticism: Literature and Otherness
Professor: William Dow
Schedule MR 09:00-10:20
This course explores works of fiction that link literary values to the ethical, social or political other. We will
stress the potentially high stakes of seeking out contact not only with the subjectivity of others, but the risky
encounter with strange or alien value systems. The literary tradition that we will study includes Thomas
Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940),
Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608). The principal focus of the course is
on narrative techniques that respond to the value and difficulty of knowing and representing social others.
We will consider how otherness is created, suppressed, challenged, coveted, and how it contributes to
forming a literary aesthetic. The course seeks to develop your skills in building evidence-based arguments
from the readings of literary texts.
EN2020D
Writing and Criticism: Thinking with the Body
Professor: Geoff Gilbert
Schedule TF 09:00-10:20
This section, ‘Thinking with the body’, will discuss the visceral elements in our cognitive processes. We tend
to locate thought in the brain, but at the same time we know that human thought is inconceivable without a
body. Experiments in Artificial Intelligence have often been forced to recognize this problem: modelling the
idea of intelligence without a particular material body at the center of that model has proved to be impossible
or incoherent. At the same time, the body has often been imagined to obstruct efficient thought, as an unruly
presence whose lusts, rages, and fatigues cloud our judgment and upset our calculation. The ways that the
body is imagined, and the ways that we think about the relations among the body and the mind and the
world, are variable across histories and cultures: we will consider a series of historical and cultural moments,
from Greek tragedy and Roman and medieval narrative through to contemporary fiction and poetry. We will
think about the status of bodily knowledge: about desiring and violent approaches to the world; about horror,
lust, and touch; about gender, sexuality, and racial embodiments. These works represent the body: we are
intensely aware of the minute details of Morvern Callar’s makeup and clothing; you may have nightmares
about Titus Andronicus’s bloody severed hand. But as well as representing the body, they also invoke the
body of the reader: constituting it as nervous, excited, desiring, perhaps producing physical shock, sweat,
blushing, and tremor. We shall discuss whether these reactions are beside the point, mere distractions from
the serious business of conceiving and communicating ideas and concepts; or whether, on the contrary, they
provide a particular cognitive grasp on the world and on human experience.
EN2020E
Writing and Criticism: The Pleasures of Crime
Professor: Russell Williams
Schedule MR 10:35-11:55
Throughout literary history, writers, readers and audiences have been fascinated by transgressions, misdeeds
and criminal acts. These range from the atrocities evoked in the plays of antiquity to the serial killer murders
familiar to fans of contemporary TV series. Murder and other serious crimes can bring about a vicarious and
frequently visceral thrill in the viewer or reader, as he or she enjoys reading such evocations from a safe
distance. Descriptions of crime can also bring reassurance as the criminal is tracked, caught, and, almost
inevitably, held to account for their crime. Writing about crime can be particularly revealing from a moral and
social perspective and frequently forces the reader to reconsider their preconceptions about crime, behaviour
and societal acceptability. This course, centred on a combination of close critical reading of primary and
secondary texts, will encourage students to question the appeal of both early writing about crime and the
genre that has subsequently come to be known as ‘crime fiction’. In particular, it will consider how the
nineteenth century was a turning point for crime fiction with the emergence of the figure of the detective and
consider how the genre can be read as a realisation of a human desire for close inquiry and discovery, or what
Carlo Ginzburg, expressed as the ‘cynegetic paradigm’. The course will also ask if there is a relationship
between such a paradigm and critical study: is the close reader also a detective? The primary source text to be
considered span from the classical period to the present day. They will include: Oedipus The King by Sophocles,
Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, a selection of stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Peril
at End House by Agatha Christie, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, and The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick
Manchette. We will also examine Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and consider its television
adaptation as part of the BBC TV series Sherlock.
EN2020F
Writing and Criticism: Medievalisms
Professor: Elizabeth Kinne
Schedule MR 15:20-16:40
The history, literature, and cultures of the millennium known as the European Middle Ages (500-1500) have
inspired authors as early as William Shakespeare to the present day. Nineteenth-century Europe and America
witnessed a revival of interest in this period for intellectual, ideological, and political motivations and this
renewed enthusiasm has yet to wane. This course will explore the projections, fantasies, adaptations, and uses
of the Middle Ages by nineteenth and twentieth-century authors, who have sought to bring back to life a
historically remote period for one reason or another. Medieval culture is at the heart of fantasy, contemporary
Arthuriana, and historical novels allowing readers a place to dream and writers a space of experimentation.
This course will give students the opportunity to discover the medieval texts that inspired more familiar
modern works and to practice the craft of comparative literature.
EN2020G
Writing and Criticism: Economics and Business in Literature
Professor: Sneharika Roy
Schedule MR 12:10-13:30
Can business and balance sheets, merchants and marketing, and inventories and IOUs really be the stuff of
literature? From Sinbad the merchant-adventurer of The Arabian Nights to Shylock the moneylender in The
Merchant of Venice, from Crusoe the eponymous island-entrepreneur to the failed salesman Willy Loman in Death
of a Salesman, from Christina Rosetti’s allegorical “Goblin Market” and its moral intoxication to the very real
market for opium described in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, a fictionalised chronicle of the Opium Wars—
business has been an enduring theme in literature across continents and centuries. This course offers students
the opportunity to visit—or revisit—economic history and theories through literature. Economic phenomena
such as gift-giving, commodity-exchange, usury, advertising, and the rise of capitalism will be re-placed in a
historical continuum (diachronic approach) in order to better understand the interaction between individuals
and the specific business practices of their societies (synchronic approach) as represented in literary texts. This
transcultural and transhistorical approach thus involves, for example: comparing the economic injunctions of
the Bible and the Quran, counterpointing the views of Aristotle and Karl Marx on usury, and exploring the
political distortion of Adam Smith’s ideas to justify monopoly, colonialism, and war. On the one hand, the shift
from a pagan to a Christian to a “secular” world involved equally significant paradigm-shifts in the world of
business, as we will see as we move from medieval to modern texts. On the other hand, applying economic
perspectives to the corpus shows the—surprising—extent to which “modern” business and “amoral”
economics are grounded in historico-religious traditions. We will also grapple with the abstractions of economic
theory and the generalisations of “business mantras” when put to the test of the messy financial, moral, and
psychological complexities of human existence.
EN2020I
Writing and Criticism: The Pleasures of Crime
Professor: Russell Williams
Schedule MR 13:45-15:05
Throughout literary history, writers, readers and audiences have been fascinated by transgressions, misdeeds
and criminal acts. These range from the atrocities evoked in the plays of antiquity to the serial killer murders
familiar to fans of contemporary TV series. Murder and other serious crimes can bring about a vicarious and
frequently visceral thrill in the viewer or reader, as he or she enjoys reading such evocations from a safe distance.
Descriptions of crime can also bring reassurance as the criminal is tracked, caught, and, almost inevitably, held
to account for their crime. Writing about crime can be particularly revealing from a moral and social perspective
and frequently forces the reader to reconsider their preconceptions about crime, behaviour and societal
acceptability. This course, centred on a combination of close critical reading of primary and secondary texts,
will encourage students to question the appeal of both early writing about crime and the genre that has
subsequently come to be known as ‘crime fiction’. In particular, it will consider how the nineteenth century was
a turning point for crime fiction with the emergence of the figure of the detective and consider how the genre
can be read as a realisation of a human desire for close inquiry and discovery, or what Carlo Ginzburg, expressed
as the ‘cynegetic paradigm’. The course will also ask if there is a relationship between such a paradigm and
critical study: is the close reader also a detective? The primary source text to be considered span from the
classical period to the present day. They will include: Oedipus The King by Sophocles, Hamlet by William
Shakespeare, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, a selection of stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Peril at End House by
Agatha Christie, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, and The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette. We will
also examine Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and consider its television adaptation as part of the
BBC TV series Sherlock.
EN2020J
Writing and Criticism: Medievalisms
Professor: Elizabeth Kinne
Schedule MR 09:00-10:20
The history, literature, and cultures of the millennium known as the European Middle Ages (500-1500) have
inspired authors as early as William Shakespeare to the present day. Nineteenth-century Europe and America
witnessed a revival of interest in this period for intellectual, ideological, and political motivations and this
renewed enthusiasm has yet to wane. This course will explore the projections, fantasies, adaptations, and uses
of the Middle Ages by nineteenth and twentieth-century authors, who have sought to bring back to life a
historically remote period for one reason or another. Medieval culture is at the heart of fantasy, contemporary
Arthuriana, and historical novels allowing readers a place to dream and writers a space of experimentation.
This course will give students the opportunity to discover the medieval texts that inspired more familiar
modern works and to practice the craft of comparative literature.
EN2020K
Writing and Criticism: Seeing And Being Seen
Professor: Kevin Kennedy
Schedule MR 16:55-18:15
Visibility is at the heart of human identity and social interaction. The ability to see and to foresee determines
action and reaction, taste and choice, knowledge and power. To be seen is to be socially recognised and,
arguably, in ways that are more and more central to our sense of identity, to be open to forms of social
control. In this course we will analyse a range of texts that explore the trope of visibility in its social, political,
technological and literary forms. We will examine positions of visibility and invisibility depicted and the
relative possibilities of voice, narrative and action permitted within them. Who sees and who fails to see, and
what are the consequences? Who is seen and who is left invisible, and how it does affect their identity? The
course will be structured around six key texts from the Western canon: two plays, Shakespeare’s King Lear and
Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, three novels, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and a collection of poems, Plath’s Ariel. Against this background students will be
able to develop and improve their reading and writing skills, learn to distinguish between different genres of
writing and to appreciate them in their specific historical and cultural contexts.
•
Faculty
Bill Dow is Professor of American Literature at the Université Paris-Est (UPEM) and Professor of English at The
American University of Paris. He is an Associate Editor of Literary Journalism Studies (Northwestern University Press)
and has published articles in such journals as Publications of the Modern Language Association, The Emily Dickinson Journal,
Twentieth-Century Literature, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Critique, The Hemingway Review, MELUS, Revue
Française D'Etudes Américaines, Actes Sud, Prose Studies, and Etudes Anglaises. He is the author of the book, Narrating Class in
American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), co-editor of Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011) and Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is currently completing a book-
length study on American Modernism and radicalism entitled Reinventing Persuasion: Literary Journalism and the American
Radical Tradition, 1900-2000.
Geoff Gilbert is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and English. He has taught at AUP since 1999;
before then he taught at the University of Cambridge in England, where he completed his doctorate. His first book was
on early twentieth century experimental writing and culture; he is currently working on a book on very contemporary
‘realist’ writing, economics, and the experience of globalisation. He is interested in Marxism, in questions of sexuality, in
contemporary poetry as well as fiction, in Scots literature, and in translation (as theory, and in practice). He also writes
poetry.
Adrian Harding did his doctoral research on the development of modernist poetry, focusing on the relations of epic
and hermetic writing across the European and American avant-gardes. This has extended backwards into European
romanticisms and laterally into various poetics of the visual arts and of narrative realism, centring on the relations of
performance and reference, the aesthetic and the ethical, touching on older questions of music and meaning. He has
written and taught on European romanticisms, modern British literature, modern American poetry and poetics,
contemporary theatre, contemporary French fiction, and literature and the visual arts. He has also lectured and written
on contemporary art and contemporary poetry, having many moons ago set up an international contemporary art gallery
and performance space in Edinburgh. He writes and researches in the areas of poetry and poetics, narrative and
performance, both anglophone and European. His work has recently focused on practices of embodiment and
dislocation in late nineteenth-century realism, on the relations between the semantics of prosody and the cultural and
social limits of a 'poetics of the real', centering on the writings of Henry James. He co-founded the European Society for
Jamesian Studies and is a member of the British Academy research group for the study of literary reception. He also has
an interest in literary translation, which he has long practised and taught. He has published poetry and is occupied with
(by?) a novel.
Brenton Hobart is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, English and French at AUP. After completing full
undergraduate and graduate curricula in both the United States and France, he received the degrees of PhD from
Harvard University (2012) and Doctorate from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (2014). His thesis—which he is
currently revising for publication—is a study of the literary representations of epidemics known as the plague in French
Renaissance literature. He likes making sandcastles on the beaches of Nice and frequenting Canadian restaurants, all over
the world.
Kevin Kennedy specializes in the work of the French writer Georges Bataille and has published extensively on the
latter’s philosophical and art-theoretical work. His other research areas include modern and contemporary German and
French philosophy (especially Nietzsche), literary and aesthetic theory, the history of the avant-garde and its legacy
(especially Surrealism) and psychoanalysis. He is currently working on a new project, exploring the place of art and
literature within contemporary society. Drawing on the history of modern aesthetics and contemporary art practices, he
is interested in the way that theoretical approaches to art and literature attempt to derive definable meanings from the
aesthetic process and how they assess its relation to other domains, such as philosophy, politics, religion and ethics.
Apart from his academic activities, he works as a free-lance writer and translator for art magazines and galleries,
specializing in contemporary art and theory.
Elizabeth Kinne. Professor Kinne has been living, studying, and teaching in France for over twelve years, her
undergraduate and graduate work including many transatlantic journeys. Having focused on romance languages as an
undergraduate, she specialized in French and English medieval literature in graduate school and received a dual PhD in
French and Women’s Studies from The Pennsylvania State University in Spring 2013. Her dissertation, “Persuading the
Polity: Authority, Marriage, and Politics in Late-Medieval France” studies the interrelatedness of gender and politics in
conduct literature for women during the Hundred Years’ War. She has been at AUP since 2010 where her writing and
literature courses often discuss gender, sexuality, and the construction of knowledge. She has taught French language
and literature in the United States and English language and literature at several French institutions. Her medieval
research interests include the Old French fabliaux, Arthurian literature, conduct literature and women’s writing. As a
gender scholar, she explores questions concerning women in the military. She also provides translating, interpreting,
research, and consulting services for French government agencies.
Rebekah Rast. Professor Rast received her doctorate from the Université Paris VIII in linguistics, with a specialization
in adult second language acquisition. Her research focuses on the role that a learner's linguistic environment (foreign
language input) plays in the acquisition process. She works in collaboration with an interdisciplinary research team Langage,
Cognition et Acquisition comprised of university faculty and CNRS researchers. She also collaborates on a European project
Varieties of Initial Learners in Language Acquisition (VILLA). Rast has taught English and linguistics at the American
University of Paris since 1992. Courses include teacher training courses (Pedagogical Grammar and TESOL
Methodologies), English courses (all levels of writing and English Grammar Review), and linguistics courses (Language
Acquisition and Social Policy, Introduction to Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Language Acquisition and
Multilingualism). Her current research interests include second and third language acquisition and the interface between
language acquisition and teaching.
Roy Rosenstein. A New Yorker by birth, Professor Rosenstein also holds British and Lithuanian passports. He took his
degrees on both sides of the Atlantic: Sorbonne (licence, maîtrise), Harvard (MA), Columbia (PhD). He has also taught
on the East and West Coasts, in Greece, in Brazil, and at the Sorbonne. In earlier years he worked as escort interpreter
for the U.S. Department of State. The French government recently named him Chevalier des arts et des lettres. As a
comparatist, his research focuses principally on the Romance languages. His publications attest wider interests,
developed in the AUP classroom teaching all periods from antiquity to contemporary. He has published on the classical
tradition, on medieval and Renaissance authors, but also on modern literatures, including English and American. He has
written about gays, Jews, and Muslims in medieval literature; Arabic ties to Western texts; Russian and German models
for Japanese fiction; foreign wars in American literature; medieval to modern women’s writing from the U.S., France,
Brazil, and elsewhere.
Sneharika Roy. Professor Roy studied English, French, and Indian literature at the University of Mumbai before pursuing
a Ph.D. at La Sorbonne Nouvelle. During her doctorate, she taught courses in Postcolonial Studies and Literature as well as
history and civilisation courses in French universities and grandes écoles. She joined the American University in 2014 where
she teaches English and Comparative Literature courses, often drawing from her research in classical and contemporary
trends in epic. Her thesis, “The Migrating Epic Muse,” focuses on the epic narratives of Herman Melville, Derek Walcott,
and Amitav Ghosh as syncretic fusions of European literary traditions and epic practices rooted in the authors’ native
contexts. Such post-classical, transnational avatars of epic require equally hybrid theoretical frameworks bridging classical
and postcolonial paradigms, an issue she continues to explore in articles published in Commonwealth Essays and Studies and
Journal of Postcolonial Writing. In 2014, she co-edited the Spring volume of the Paris-based peer-review journal Commonwealth
Essays and Studies. She is currently working on varied projects, notably a chapter for a volume on Amitav Ghosh in the
MLA series “Approaches to Teaching World Literature.” She has also expanded her research interests to explore the
dynamics of epic in classical Sanskrit and Latin literature as well as the rise of the “business epic” in contemporary literature.
David Tresilian’s academic background is in modern English and Comparative Literature. More recently he has moved
into the study of the modern and contemporary literature of the Arab world. He has published widely on modern Arabic
literature in English and Spanish. His 'A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature' appeared in 2008, as did his
translation of 'Conscience of a Nation: Writers and Society in Modern Egypt,’ a standard work on particularly the
literature of modern Egypt. His ‘A Brief Introduction’ is now routinely assigned in introductory courses on the literature
of the modern Arab world. He is also a writer, editor and translator. He has worked as a consultant in cultural
development, notably for UNESCO in Central and Southwest Asia, and he published a book on poverty alleviation and
community based development with UNESCO in 2005. Most recently, he has worked on projects in Southeast Asia, the
People’s Democratic Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China, as well as on private-sector projects in
Southeast Asia where he was based in Singapore. His journalism regularly appears in ‘Al-Ahram Weekly’, published in
Cairo, as well as in the ‘Arab Weekly’ in London, and he has commented on Middle East affairs for media outlets in
Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. Current projects include a study of modern Arabic literary translation and a
similar work to his ‘Brief Introduction’, this time focusing on the literature of the Arab Maghreb.
Russell Williams came to AUP after completing his doctoral studies and teaching for four years at the Université ParisEst. His research focusses on the novel and his PhD thesis explored the style, poetics and narrative technique of the
French writer Michel Houellebecq. In addition to his ongoing work on Houellebecq, Russell Williams’ research concerns
modern and contemporary American literature, the cultural resonances between French and English language writing,
and European detective fiction, particularly the work of néo-polar writers Thierry Jonquet and Jean-Patrick Manchette. He
has also published on the relationship between writing and notions of extremity and writing and intoxication. In addition
to fiction, Professor Williams is interested in contemporary cinema and visual art as well as experimental music and
noise. His journalism and literary criticism regularly appears in publications including the Times Literary Supplement, the
New Statesman, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Quietus. He also writes for his website, www.urbanlandfill.co.uk. He
tweets at @russwilliams_uk