MA Faculty

Moustafa Bayoumi, associate professor; Ph.D., Columbia. Co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage) Bayoumi is a specialist in post-colonial literature and in literary theory. He has published essays on literature, music, history, architecture, and politics in Transition, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Souls, Arab Studies Quarterly, Interventions, Amerasia, Middle East Report, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books, and other publications. He served a three-year term on the National Council of the American Studies Association, and is currently an editorial committee member of Middle East Report.

Ellen Belton, professor: Ph.D., Columbia. A specialist in Shakespeare and English Renaissance drama, Belton has published essays on Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, and John Webster. She has also published articles on Jane Austen and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Belton was dean of undergraduate studies for ten years and chair of the English Department for six. She also served as acting dean of the CUNY Honors College and as chair of the Brooklyn College Faculty Council.

Thomas Boyle, professor; Ph.D., New York University. Boyle is the author of Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism, a new-historicist study of the relationship between nineteenth-century British crime journalism and the evolution of fiction from 1850-1900, as well as essays on related topics. He has also published a freshman writing anthology and a number of works of fiction, including a trilogy of "literary" crime novels set against the backdrop of Brooklyn's social history. He has been a Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts; the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Elaine Brooks, professor and deputy chair for administration; Ph.D., New York University. Brooks specializes in second language composition, applied linguistics, interdisciplinary collaboration on linked courses, and content-based instruction. She has written Making Peace, a textbook centered on global community, "Evaluating ESL Writing" (in Dialogue on Writing, ed. DeLuca, et al), and presented on a number of topics, including "Teaching Strategies for ESL Students in the Composition and Literature Classroom." In addition to serving as deputy for the ESL Program, she facilitated a faculty development seminar on Writing Across the Curriculum.

Rachel M. Brownstein, professor; Ph.D., Yale. Brownstein is the author of Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (1982) and Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comedie-Francaise (1993), as well as numerous essays and reviews, many of them about Jane Austen. She teaches 19th century literature, women's studies, and biography in the English Ph.D. Program and the Liberal Studies Program (of which she is Deputy Executive Officer) at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as at Brooklyn College.

James Davis, associate professor and deputy chair for graduate studies; Ph.D., Indiana University. Davis, who also teaches in the American Studies Program, has published essays on Henry James and Ida B. Wells and a book about the intersection of race and emergent U.S. consumer culture entitled Commerce in Color (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He is a recipient of a fellowship for 2008-2009 at the Leon Levy Center for the Study of Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Geraldine DeLuca, professor; Ph.D., New York University. DeLuca was director of freshman English for 12 years and coordinator of writing across the curriculum for five. She is a Contemplative Practice Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2005-2006 . She teaches courses in Literature and Contemplation, Italian-American literature, Memoir, Theories and Practice of Teaching Writing, and children's literature. She co-edited Dialogue on Writing, an anthology of readings for teachers. She also co-founded and for 15 years co-edited The Lion and the Unicorn: a Critical Journal of Children's Literature. She has published widely in the field of children's literature and is now at work on a book about contemplative practices in the classroom.

Martin Elsky, professor; Ph.D., Columbia. Elsky is articles editor of Renaissance Quarterly and former Coordinator of the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published on Renaissance devotional literature, Humanist language theory, Early Modern print culture, and the ideology of the Renaissance country house. A contributor to the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, he has published essays and book chapters on Donne, Milton, Jonson, Bacon, Herbert, Burton, and Vives. He is currently at work on two projects: German emigre scholars, especially Erich Auerbach, and the formation of US medieval-renaissance literary criticism, and the material history of Early Modern English domestic architecture and personal consciousness in sixteenth and seventeenth-century poetry and prose.

Joseph Entin, associate professor; Ph.D., Yale. His primary interests include American literature, cultural studies, visual culture, and the arts of social protest. He is the author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and co-editor of Controversies in the Classroom: A Radical Teacher Reader (Teachers College Press, forthcoming). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Novel, American Quarterly, New Labor Forum, Radical Teacher, Workplace, and The Novel and the American Left (University of Iowa Press, 2004).

Wendy W. Fairey, professor; Ph.D., Columbia. Fairey teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, American, and Anglophone literature, especially the novel, in women's studies, and in creative writing, among other fields. Her essays on George Eliot, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and on women's biography and autobiography, have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. She has a particular interest in Indian (South Asian) English fiction and contemporary transnational texts. She is the author Full House (SMU Press), a collection of short stories, and One of the Family (W.W. Norton), a family memoir. Her current project, a work that combines personal narrative and literary criticism, is entitled From Orphan to Immigrant: Life Lived in Fiction.

Renison Gonsalves, associate professor; Ph.D. The CUNY Graduate Center. His major interests include linguistics, semantics, the philosophy of language, and the West Indian novel. He has published on such topics as "The mental representation of word meaning," and "Locke's definitional semantics." He has been a participant in NEH summer seminars on such topics as "Language and Man" and "Reference; Language and Reality."

Kathleen Haley, assistant professor; Ph.D. Harvard. She specializes in Renaissance and 18-th century history and literature and has written articles on Ben Jonson, Dante, Rabelais and Swift, all forthcoming in 2010. She is currently writing a handbook for humor studies which uses models from music and dance to interpret comic texts.

Rosamond S. King, assistant professor, Ph.D., New York University. King's research and teaching interests include Caribbean and African literature and culture, as well as sexuality, carnival, and performance studies. Her published articles include "Sex and Sexuality in English Caribbean Novels – A Survey from 1950," "Sheep and Goats Together – Interracial Relationships from Black Men's Perspectives," and "Dressing Down: Male Transvestism in Two Caribbean Carnivals." King's poetry has appeared in over a dozen journals and anthologies, and she recently held a Fulbright Fellowship in The Gambia, West Africa.

Nicola Masciandaro, associate professor, Ph.D. Yale. A specialist in medieval literature, Masciandaro is the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, 2007) as well as articles and essays on the animal/human boundary, eros, sorrow, and mysticism. His current book project is entitled The One with a Hand: Labor, Embodiment, and the Animal/Human Boundary. Masciandaro is editor and founder of the online journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary.

Geoffrey Minter, assistant professor; Ph.D., Harvard. General interest in American literature from the Puritan era to the current century. Other, specific interests: the Enlightenment and related literary modes (Romanticism, the Gothic, etc.); the traditions of English lyric poetry, chiefly from Spenser to Stevens; Aestheticism and Decadence; Queer Representation and Theory; boys and boyhood as literary subjects; Literature, History, and New Historicism; Biography and Autobiography; Opera and Film. Has written on the cultural importance of boyhood before and after the American Civil War, and other topics in American literature through the 19th Century.

Mark Patkowski, professor; Ph.D., New York University. His major interests include linguistics, applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and semiotics. His research has been published in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, IRAL: International Review of Applied Linguistics, and TESOL Quarterly, and in edited volumes such as Child-Adult Differences in Second-Language Acquisition, First and Second Language Phonology, and Mainstreaming: Case Studies in TESOL Practice Series. He has also received a Fulbright lecturing award in linguistics and recently taught at the University of Paris-8.

John Roy, associate professor; Ph.D., Columbia. A linguist, Roy has published on such topics as "The Status of English Creole Students in Public Schools" and "Issues in the Origin of English Creole and Black English." He is also the author of numerous book reviews and has developed phonetic fonts for use by Apple Computer, Inc., and IBM.

Marie Rutkoski, assistant professor; Ph.D., Harvard. Rutkoski teaches courses in English Renaissance literature and history, children’s literature, and fiction writing. She has published articles on children in English Renaissance drama in Studies in English Literature and Criticism. Her published novels for children and young adults include The Cabinet of Wonders (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux 2008) and The Celestial Globe (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux 2010).

Jessica Siegel, assistant professor; M.S., Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, M.A. Teachers College. She is both a journalist and a teacher educator. She has published articles about education, the arts and social issues in journals such as Schools Watch, The Village Voice, and Harvard Magazine. She has worked as a managing editor both at The Bergen Record, the second largest newspaper in New Jersey, and for Electronic Learning. Currently, she is working on a project on the history of the Jews in the Caribbean. Her own teaching was the subject of Small Victories by Samuel G. Freedman, which was nominated for a National Book Award.

Karl Steel, assistant professor; Ph.D., Columbia. A medievalist, Steel's research focuses on relationships between humans and animals. He has published on the dominant medieval conception of being human ("How to Make a Human," in Exemplaria 20 (2008): 3-27), and has articles forthcoming on the deliciousness of human flesh in medieval anthropophagy narratives (in Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism (Ohio UP)) and on Shakespeare's short elegy, "The Phoenix and Turtle" (in the anthology Shakesqueer (Duke UP)). He participates in the medievalist blog "In the Middle" (jjcohen.blogspot.com).

Ellen Tremper, professor and chair of the English Department; Ph.D., Harvard. Specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British poetry and fiction, Tremper has published many articles on Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and children's literature and is the author of "Who Lived at Alfoxton?": Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism (Bucknell University Press) and I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Film and Fiction, which was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2006.

Albena Vassileva, assistant professor and director of the comparative literature program; Ph.D., Emory University. Her major areas of interest are twentieth-century English and East European literatures, Romanticism, and contemporary literary criticism. She has contributed to journals such as Studies in the Humanities, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, The College Language Association Journal, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, World Literature Today, and others. She is currently working on her book Reference, Trauma, and History: The Testimonies of American and Russian Postmodernisms.

Robert Viscusi, professor; Ph.D., New York University. Viscusi has published a critical study entitled Max Beerbohm, or the Dandy Dante: Rereading with Mirrors (Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), the novel Astoria (Guernica, 1995; American Book Award 1996), the long poem An Oration upon the Most Recent Death of Christopher Columbus (VIA Folios, 1993), a poetry collection entitled A New Geography of Time (Guernica , 2004), a critical history entitled Buried Caesars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing (SUNY Press, 2006), and numerous essays on Italian American literature and culture. He is a Broeklundian Professor, an executive officer of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, the president of the Italian American Writers Association, and he has held fellowships from the NEH and the Calandra Italian American Institute.