Search | Literatures in English

Winthrop (Pete) Wetherbee began his distinguished career at Cornell in 1967. He has won National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships, among others, and has published very widely in the fields of Medieval literature and culture, Chaucer studies, Medieval Latin, Dante students, and the European Medieval tradition. He worked in the field advising students and teaching inmates through the Cornell in Auburn Program where he served as faculty director.

/winthrop-wetherbee

Joan Lubin

Joan Lubin is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in science & literature in the Society for the Humanities and the English Department. She received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania with a concentration in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She was the 2017 John Money Fellow for Scholars of Sexology at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana. She is currently completing two book projects. Pulp Sexology is a literary history of the quantitative human sciences, combining extensive archival research with approaches from history of science, cultural studies, and sexuality studies. It uncovers the imprint of the quantitative turn in mid-century American sexology exemplified by the Kinsey Reports on the literary production of the postwar period, tracing the logics of gay liberation out of the unlikely wellspring of data aggregation. Her second project, Social Science Fictions, centers the historical convergence between the genres of science fiction and campus novel over the course of the long 1970s, offering a critical account of the shaping force of scientism in the discipline of English. Drawing upon institutional archives, conference proceedings, syllabi, fan zines, publishing history, and more, it reconstructs the institutionalization of sci-fi as an object of legitimate scholarly attention as sci-fi itself became increasingly obsessed with the campus as perhaps the most alien world of all. Lubin has published on The Incredible Shrinking Man, cold war population explosion discourse, and climate catastrophe in Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2017), and is currently completing articles on the literary history of the Kinsey Reports, Hugo Gernsback’s pulp sexology, and the couple form in lesbian historiography. She is co-editing an interdisciplinary journal issue, “The Sexological Floorplan,” on the history of sexuality and the politics of space. Lubin is curator of a historical exhibition of gay pulp fiction at the John J. Wilcox, Jr., Archive at the William Way LGBT Center, and co-curator of an exhibition of AIDS Architectures opening at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in 2021. At Cornell, Lubin will be teaching seminars on topics in science and literature in the English Department, including Sexology and the Novel; The 21st Century; and Quantification: Literature that Counts.

/joan-lubin

Sarah Jefferis

Sarah Jefferis is the author of What Enters the Mouth (Standing Stone press, 2017) and Forgetting the Salt (Foothills press, 2008). She is currently at work on her third collection of poetry, After Marriage, and a collection of essays on racial violence and love in Virginia. She received her PhD from SUNY Binghamton, her MFA in Poetry from Cornell, and has taught at Ithaca College, Wells, and Binghamton before returning to the English Department. Bruce Smith, author of The Other Lover and Devotions claims that Sarah’s new book, What Enters the Mouth, has “a licked clean, all in, unreasonable, unafraid, incendiary, vulnerable and startling reckoning I admire.” Ansel Elkins, author of Blue Yodel, asserts “this is a brave collection that strides beautifully into a power and wildness of womanhood that refuses to be contained.” She won the Bea Gonzalez poetry prize from Stone Canoe for her poem: “Motherhood.” Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in Rhino, The Mississippi Review, The American Literary Review, Stone Canoe, Icon, The Hollins Critic, The Patterson Review, Icarus, The Healing Muse and other journals. She has been both a poetry fellow and fiction fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Center in California, the Saltonstall Foundation, and an artist in residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Her research interests include contemporary poetry, diaspora studies, diversity and inclusion in higher education, sexual violence on college campuses, theatre, dance, and modern art.

/sarah-jefferis

Daniel R. Schwarz

Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1968. In 1998 he received Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences Russell award for distinguished teaching, and the Weiss title also speaks to his teaching prowess.

/daniel-r-schwarz

Madeline Reynolds

Maddie Reynolds works on animal studies and ecocriticism in nineteenth-century fiction, examining how British writers categorized the status of the human in the age of British imperialism. She recently defended her dissertation, entitled, Anthropomorphic Representations: Blurring Animal-Human Boundaries in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. The project focuses on how animals in these works transcend human-animal hierarchies, while at the same time demonstrating that the language of animality has dragged marginalized human groups down these hierarchies in the service of racism and misogyny.

/madeline-reynolds

Korey Williams

Korey grew up in suburban Chicago. During his undergraduate career, he studied abroad at Hertford College, University of Oxford. He participated in the 2012 Summer Workshop organized by the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers in Andover, MA. Williams has worked as a Library and Learning Support Assistant at the National Louis University in Downtown Chicago. His poetry has been published in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry. Williams is currently composing a novel-in-verse. Thesis: Bound.

/korey-williams

Renia White

Renia grew up in District Heights, MD and Riverdale, GA and has trained with various organizations in the journalism industry. She is the winner of the 2016 Sonora Review Poetry contest. Her work has been featured in: The Body Narratives, Episodic Magazine, The New Guard, Stone Canoe and The Offing. Her poetry has been named a finalist for honors such as the Knightville Poetry Contest and the Pocataligo Poetry Prize. She received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers. Thesis: By Omission.

/renia-white

Tess Wheelwright

I am the academic director of the Cornell Prison Education Program, a dozen-year-old project that engages Cornell faculty, graduate students and undergraduates in offering a liberal arts curriculum culminating in an associate degree at four regional prisons. I also teach writing for the program.

/tess-wheelwright

Christine Vines

Christine is at work on a collection of short stories and a novel. For four years, she ran the Fiction Addiction reading series in New York City. Thesis: Jubilee.

/christine-vines

Mary-Margaret Stevens

Mary-Margaret was born and raised in upstate New York. Her work has won the Arthur Lynn Andrews Award for Fiction three times, received an honorable mention for the George Harmon Coxe Award in Creative Writing, and appeared in Syracuse University’s Stone Canoe. Thesis: The Boys.

/mary-margaret-stevens

Kirsten Saracini

Kirsten was born in Atlantic City and raised outside of Philadelphia. She has worked in hospitals and high schools and was most recently an editorial assistant at One Story. She is at work on a narrative nonfiction project. Thesis: Freaky Willy & Other Stories.

/kirsten-saracini

Lena Nguyen

Lena was raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She holds a BA in Creative Writing and a BA in Political Science from Arizona State University, in addition to her MFA from Cornell. Lena’s work has appeared in the Harvard Review and the book Creating Life from Life: Science Fiction and Biotechnology. Her fiction has won multiple awards in competitions such as the worldwide Writers of the Future contest. She enjoys teaching, writing, and free-lance editing. Lena is currently at work on her second speculative fiction novel. Thesis: We Have Always Been Here.

/lena-nguyen

Aurora Masum-Javed

Aurora Masum-Javed is a poet, performer, and educator. Her poetry can be found in Nimrod, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix), Callaloo, Jaggery, and So to Speak. She was the winner of the Winter Tangerine Award, and a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize as well as the BWR Flash Prose Contest. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, Callaloo, Squaw Valley, Pink Door, and BOAAT. She is the 2018 Fall Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. She is currently working on her first collection of poems.

/aurora-masum-javed

Richard LaRose

Richard is a Métis poet who grew up near Buffalo Lake, Alberta, Canada. Before attending Cornell, he studied poetry under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott in Gros Islet, St. Lucia. Thesis: AEN OOSHCHIMINAMIHK.

/richard-larose

Cody Klippenstein

Cody grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her work has won the Zoetrope: All-Story short fiction prize, The Fiddlehead short fiction prize, was a finalist for The Malahat Review's Open Season Award, and earned her an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship for 2015. Thesis: The Light Years, a novel.

/cody-klippenstein

Samson Jardine

Samson was born in Boston and raised in Rhode Island. He studied at Parsons School of Design and University of Rhode Island. In 2014, he received the Rhode Island Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Thesis: After August.

/samson-jardine

Vincent Hiscock

Vincent Hiscock grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and the northern reaches of the San Joaquin Valley in northern California. His writing is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poet Lore and has been featured in the art book A Poem a Day, in performances at the Institut für Raumexperimente and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and in an installation at the Belgian art museum Mu.ZEE. Vincent's (primarily free verse) poetry concerns itself with matters of family, work, mental illness, temporality, land, romance, the US West, and--what runs through all these subjects--experiences of complicated love. His research and teaching interests include: poetry, modernism, and contemporary art. Vincent has received a BA with Departmental Distinction in both English and American Studies from Vassar College and an MFA, chaired by Alice Fulton, from Cornell University.

/vincent-hiscock

Emily Rials

Emily Rials is a postdoctoral lecturer in English at Cornell University. She defended her dissertation, “Brackets and Bodies: Punctuated Physicality in Modernist and Contemporary Fiction,” in May 2017. Her book manuscript argues for a narrative theory that considers how novels’ nonverbal components, including punctuation and page spacing, shape their narrative representations of embodiment. Emily’s work on the intersections of narratology, book history, and feminist and disability studies fuels her additional research and teaching interests in experimental contemporary fiction, lyric criticism, and bookmaking. Her work has appeared in Textual Practice and The Seneca Review.

/emily-rials

Liza Flum

Liza Flum grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in poetry from Cornell, and her poems appear in journals including The Southeast Review, Lambda Literary, H_NGM_N, The Collagist, and PRISM international. A poetry editor for Omnidawn Publishing, she has recently received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Saltonstall Foundation and Tent: Creative Writing.

/liza-flum

Barry Adams

Barry Banfield Adams is a Prof Emeritus from the Department of English at Cornell University. As a distinguished scholar of the humanities with a deep commitment to undergraduate education, Barry Adams' tenure in the Department of English spanned 38 years. His essays on medieval and renaissance drama have appeared in many professional journals, and he was a contributor to a volume titled Teaching Shakespeare. During his Cornell Career, he served as vice provost, chairman of the English department, chairman of the University Faculty Library Board, and served on the Faculty Council of Representatives. In 1976, Boston College awarded him a Presidential Bicentennial Award for personal dedication, excellence and service.

/barry-adams

Dan McCall

Dan McCall is an authority on American Literature and Creative Writing. He came to Cornell in 1966 and taught here for 40 years. He is the author of several novels, including Jack the Bear (1974), which has been translated into a dozen languages, and Triphammer (1991). His critical and scholarly books include The Example of Richard Wright (1969), The Silence of Bartleby (1989), Citizens of Somewhere Else (1999), and The Norton Critical Edition of Melville's Short Novels (2002).

/dan-mccall

Brad Zukovic

/brad-zukovic

James Warren

James Perrin Warren has taught American literature and environmental studies at Washington and Lee University for over thirty years. His scholarship has depended especially on archival research and dwelt upon interdisciplinary subjects. He is the author of three monographs on nineteenth-century American culture, focusing on writers like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Theodore Roosevelt. Recently he has published a scholarly edition of Mary Austin’s collected poems, The Road to the Spring (Syracuse UP, 2014). Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists is his fifth book, forthcoming from University of Arizona Press in Fall 2015. He is currently finishing a book about the poems and essays of Alaska writer John Haines.

/james-warren

Paul Sawyer

Before coming to Cornell University in 1975, Paul Sawyer lived eight years in New York as a student at Columbia University. He’s the author of Ruskin’s Poetic Argument (1985) and articles on Victorian literary prose, the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, pornography, and other topics. His interests include the Victorian era, cultural studies, the American 1960s, writing pedagogy, the history of aesthetics and criticism, and historical approaches to the study of literature. Since 2006 he’s been director of the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. As a founding member of the Cornell Prison Education Project he teaches occasional courses in a maximum security prison at Auburn, NY, as part of that program. His current projects include a book on the literature and culture of the American 1960s and a monograph on the Autobiography of Malcolm X. He’s also interested in developing service-learning courses for undergraduates and in working with graduate students who are teaching writing and literature courses in prison.

/paul-sawyer

Hortense Spillers

Winthrop Wetherbee