Department of English

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Faculty of the Department of English

Patricia Alden
Peter Bailey, Department Chair
Margaret Kent Bass
Caroline Breashears
Bob Cowser
Bruce Danner
Robert DeGraaff
Sarah Gates
Paul Graham
Kerry Grant
Duriel Harris
Mary Hussmann
John Jaunzems
Richard Jenseth
K.L.Cook
Hillory Oakes
Pedro Ponce
Mark Priewe
Natalia Rachel Singer
Sid Sondergard
Eve Stoddard
Robert Thacker
Susan Ward
Bruce I. Weiner

Administrative Secretary, Charlotte Ward

Educated in Canada, John Jaunzems studied medieval literature at the University of Toronto, receiving his PhD in 1972. Coming to St. Lawrence in 1973, he has taught Chaucer and other medieval authors, as well as courses in world masterpieces, early English literature, fiction, and the history of the English language. He is especially interested in the way that people use language to shape and organize their thinking-and in the way that fields such as grammar and narrative theory can illuminate these elusive and intriguing processes

Bob Cowser's teaching and research interests include creative nonfiction , (particularly memoir and literary journalism), poetry, and later American literature. His essays and reviews have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Sonora Review, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, American Literary Review and Prairie Schooner, and his essay "Scorekeeping" appeared alongside the work of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford in Connecting, an anthology of writing about family edited by Lee Gutkind. Cowser spent the summer of 2001 as a defensive end for the Watertown Red and Black, America's oldest semi-pro football team, and plans to turn the experience into a book in the tradition of Paper Lion, George Plimpton's classic model of immersion journalism. An Academy of American Poets prizewinner and a Pushcart Prize nominee, Cowser holds a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. http://www.bobcowser.com

Thomas L. Berger, Piskor Professor of English, teaches courses in early modern English Literature, 1475-1700. He is the United States secretary of the Malone Society, for whom he has prepared facsimile editions of the first quartos of 2 Henry IV and A Mdisummer Night's Dream. With Suzanne Gossett (Loyola University, Chicago) he has prepared a Malone Society Collections volume of seventeenth-century academic plays from manuscript books in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Currently he is preparing a facsimile edition of the unique quarto edition of Titus Andronicus (1594) housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library. He has recently edited a special issue of Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, "Shakespeare and his Stationers, 1593-2001." He has for many years been making fitful progress on a New Variorum edition of Shakespeare's Henry V for the Modern Language Association, in collaboration with George W. Williams. He regularly reviews books on Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and his times for Shakespeare Quarterly. He is general editor of the Globe Quarto Editions, a series of modernized editions of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries. With colleague Sidney Sondergard he revised and expanded his Index of Characters in Early Modern Drama for Cambridge University Press. He is a close personal friend of and advisor to This Corner, editor-in-chief of The Blue Note, a monthly publication at St. Lawrence University.

Susan Ward received her Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Connecticut and also studied journalism at Columbia University. She is the editor of Dear Home: The 1901 and 1902 Diaries of Mabel Lila Wait and the author of numerous articles on Jack London and American women writers. She teaches courses in American literature, Native American fiction, women writers, creative non-fiction, and journalism.

Natalia Rachel Singer teaches courses in the craft of fiction, creative nonfiction, as well as a seminar in environmental literature. She is the editor, with Neal Burdick, of Living North Country: Essays on Life and Landscapes in Northern New York. Her fiction and nonfiction have been widely published in magazines and literary journals such as Harper's, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, The North American Review (where she is a contributing editor), Ms., O: The Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and has appeared in anthologies like Microfiction and The Best Writing on Writing. She has won won several national awards for her writing, including the World's Best Short-Story contest, and she has been a recipient of a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts for nonfiction literature.

Caroline Breashears, who received her PhD from the University of Virginia, specializes in eighteenth-century British literature. She has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Philological Quarterly and has reviewed books for Biography and The Scriblerian. She is at work on a book about unconventional women’s memoirs published in Britain in the long eighteenth century. She teaches introductory courses in British literature and fairy tales and upper-level seminars in the eighteenth-century novel and British women writers.

Bruce I. Weiner, who received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, specializes in 18th and 19th century American literature and is the author of The Most Noble of Professions: Poe and the Poverty of Authorship (1986). His essays on Poe also appear in The Naiad Voice (1983), Poe and Our Times (1986), Poe and His Times (1990), Poe's Pym (1992), and Perspectives on Poe (1996). He has also written introductions to Wordsworth editions of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Irving's The Sketchbook. He teaches courses on all periods of American literature, including a course on literature and the environment.

Mary Hussmann, who received her MFA from The University of Iowa, specializes in creative nonfiction and nature and environmental writing. She has co-edited a book called Transgressions: The Iowa Review Anthology of Innovative Fiction, and has published essays, poetry, book reviews and interviews in anthologies and journals including Southern Cultures, American Nature Writing 2001, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Brevity, and 5Trope, among others. She teaches courses in creative nonfiction, nature and environmental writing, and environmental autobiography, as well as teaching off campus in the Adirondack semester program.

Kerry Grant, who received his PhD from the University of Virginia, specializes in contemporary fiction, and is the author of A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 and A Companion to V. His articles on a variety of American writers have appeared in Critique, Pynchon Notes, Modern Language Studies and The Durham University Journal. He teaches courses on contemporary American and British fiction, twentieth-century American literature, and newswriting. His interests include the role of computers in teaching.

Sid Sondergard, Craig Professor, received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, specializes in early modern English literature and popular culture, and is the author of Sharpening her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers, and co-author of The Cabala of Pegasus: An Annotated Translation of Giordano Bruno's Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo (1585) [with Madison U. Sowell] and An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500-1660 [with Thomas L. Berger and William C. Bradford]. His articles have appeared in such journals as Acta, The American Journal of Semiotics, Critique, Mediaevalia, Studies in Philology, Studies in Scottish Literature, and Theatre Survey. He teaches courses on European and American popular culture, early modern European and Asian literature, and screenwriting. His research interests include the literature and history of magic.

Margaret Kent Bass's research interests are autobiography studies and literatures of the African Diaspora. Her current research is on the
literature and culture of Black Canadians. In addition to scholarly
essays, Bass writes creative nonfiction.

Robert DeGraaff (Ph.D. from Duke, 1972) has published criticism on various British writers in Victorian Newsletter, Victorian Studies, The Journal of Narrative Technique and other places. His magnum opus, however, is an excursion into literary herpetology, The Book of the Toad; recently, he has taken to writing poetry. He regularly teaches "Introduction to Poetry," the second half of the English literature survey, and several courses in Victorian literature.

Patricia Alden received her Ph.D. at Stanford University, specializing in
modern British literature. In over a quarter of a century at St. Lawrence,
her research focus has shifted from Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence to post-colonial and, specifically, African literature. She co-authored a book on Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah and has published articles on Zimbabwean authors. Her courses include the modern British novel, African literature, survey of British literature, and post-colonial literature in English. She also serves on the African Studies Board and currently serves as associate dean for international and intercultural studies. The best part of this new position, in her view, is advising students about their proposals for travel and research grants to enrich their study abroad experience.

Robert Thacker, who teaches in the Canadian Studies program as well as the English department, specializes in Canadian literature in English with particular interest in Canada-U.S. literary comparisons, western writing, and Alice Munro. He edits The American Review of Canadian Studies and his publications include The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination and two recent edited volumes: The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro and Willa Cather’s Canadian and Old World Connections. He is at work on a critical biography of Ms. Munro. Vita

Eve Stoddard is Professor of English and Chair of the Global Studies
Department at St. Lawrence. She has been at St. Lawrence since 1986,
having earned her A.B. at Mount Holyoke and her Ph.D. at UCLA where she
specialized in the literature and philosophy of the Romantic era,
writing her dissertation on Wordsworth and Kant. The confluence of her
work in literary theory and in 18th-century British attitudes toward
slavery, she has moved into the field of post-colonial and cultural
studies. Her current teaching interests include Irish and Caribbean
literatures as well as post-colonial theory. She collaborates frequently
with Grant Cornwell, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at St. Lawrence.
Together they have edited a book called Global Muilticulturalism:
Comparative Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Nation and they have
written a monograph called Globalizing Knowledge for the Association of
American Colleges and Universities. They team teach several courses for
the Cultural Encounters program and they are writing a book on the
semiotics of sugar mill ruins in the Caribbean.

Peter Bailey, Piskor Professor, attended Kenyon College before receiving his B.A. from the
New School College, New School of Social Research. The Johns Hopkins
University Writing Seminars provided him with an M.A., and his Ph.D. in
English is from the University of Southern California. Bailey is the
author of two books of criticism--Reading Stanley Elkin(1985) and The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2000)--as well as articles on
contemporary American literature and film.

Pedro Ponce has published fiction in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, 3rd bed, DIAGRAM, and other journals. He teaches courses in fiction writing and 20th-Century American literature and his research interests include narrative theory and theories of genre. He has an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an M.F.A. from Western Michigan University.

Duriel E. Harris -Heralded as one of three Chicago poets for the 21st century by WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, Duriel E. Harris is a co-founder of the Black Took Collective and a Poetry Editor for Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora. Drag (Elixir Press, 2003), her first book, was hailed by Black Issues Book Review as one of the best poetry volumes of the year. She is currently at work on AMNESIAC, a media arts project (poetry volume, DVD, sound recording, website) funded in part by the UCSB Center for Black Studies Race and Technology Initiative. AMNESIAC writings appear or are forthcoming in Beyond the Frontier, Warpland, nocturnes, The Encyclopedia Project, Mixed Blood and The Ringing Ear. A performing poet/sound artist, Harris is a Cave Canem fellow, recent resident at The MacDowell Colony, and member of the free jazz ensemble Douglas Ewart & Inventions. Recent appearances include featured performances at Millennium Park (Chicago), The UCSB Multicultural Center (Santa Barbara), the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Bowery Poetry Club (NYC). Her teaching and research interests include Modern and Contemporary American poetry, blues and funk aesthetics, oppositional/experimental poetics, trauma studies, and new media. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, an M.A. from the Graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU and a B.A. in Literature from Yale University.