My scholarly publications include a book on Wordsworth (Impure Conceits, Stanford 1997) and critical articles on “Romantic collaboration,” defined broadly to include the many kinds of literary relationships--such as joint authorship, intertextual dialogue, parody, quotation, address, influence, editing, sharing, and plagiarism--that manifest themselves, often in clusters, in texts from the Romantic period. One of my recent essays on this topic examines the editorial labor of love performed by Sara Coleridge, S.T. Coleridge's daughter, who, after her father's death, brought his fragmented body of work together into publishable form, defended the integrity of the texts and their author, and helped to establish Coleridge as an enduringly great mind. The essay, "The Body of My Father's Writings: Sara Coleridge's Genial Labor," appears in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship (Wisconsin, 2006), edited by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson.

Lately, I have become intrigued by current instances of collaborative or interactive writing facilitated by recent technological developments. Wikis and other such new forms of writing challenge traditional ideas about authorship, intellectual property, and the boundaries of “a” “work” in ways anticipated by Romantic-period texts (whether avowedly collaborative or not). With their multiple layers and pathways, their complex systems of images, their subversion of linear progression, and their profusion of notes and glosses, Romantic-period texts (both poetry and prose and mixed) anticipate hypertext. The emerging field of "network studies" offers some interesting perspectives on the complex interrelations within and across texts.

Yu Jin Ko
My teaching interests center on Shakespeare, with a special focus on performance and boy actors. However, being a casual apologist for humanist studies, I do venture out of the English Renaissance into European drama and narrative. I also have an interest in Asian-American literature, contemporary poetry, and pulp fiction.
Recent publications:
"Othello," Shakespeare Bulletin
Mutability and Division on Shakespeare’s Stage, (University of Delaware Press, 2004).

Yoon Sun Lee
My teaching and research interests fall into two categories: 18th- and 19th-century British literature and Asian-American literature. I also teach in the Writing Program and in the American Studies Program.
My first book, Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford UP, 2004), examines the political and literary uses of irony by conservative non-English writers in Romantic and early Victorian Britain. My second book, currently in progress, focuses on the construction of the everyday in Asian Pacific American literature and history.


Kathryn Lynch
In our department, I do all things medieval, from Beowulf to the Bréton lai. My particular focus is the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and I have become increasingly interested recently in the period boundary between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I also am working on the role that food plays in medieval poetry, right now in a book about food and drink in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Other scholarly interests in recent years have included the medieval dream-vision genre, Chaucer and Shakespeare, and medieval cultural geography (how the Middle Ages understood and constructed the non-European world). In 2000, I published a book on Chaucer’s dream-vision poetry, while in 2002 I edited a collection of essays entitled Chaucer’s Cultural Geography and in 2006 a Norton Critical edition of Chaucer’s Dream Visions and Other Poems.

Susan Meyer
In my teaching and research I focus primarily on the 19th-century British novel, literature and imperialism, and early 20th-century American literature. My book, Imperialism at Home: Race in Victorian Women's Fiction (Cornell 1996) examines the use of metaphors of race in the fiction of the Bront‘s and George Eliot and the relationship between British domestic fiction and the history of imperialism. I also recently co-edited a book (with Barbara Harman) of feminist readings of lesser-known Victorian fiction entitled The New Nineteenth Century (Garland 1996). Other recent publications include articles on Victorian women writers (Charlotte Bront‘, Anne Bront‘, and George Eliot), an article surveying the work of the contemporary Jewish writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and a study of the anxieties about industrial capitalism reflected in the work of the American photographer Lewis Hine. I am beginning work on a new book on the representation of Jews in early twentieth-century American literature.

James Noggle
My intellectual interests include: poetry and the history of aesthetics, particularly in 18th century English literature; the philosophy of mind; the history of skepticism; the origins and development of the novel; literary theory; Restoration comedy; ordinary-language philosophy; and film.

I was born and raised in California, educated as an undergraduate at Columbia and Cambridge universities, and in 1994, got a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. My scholarly focus in recent years has been on relations between philosophy and literature in 18th-century British writing. My book The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists was published in 2001 by Oxford University Press. I am editor, with Lawrence Lipking, of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 1C: the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. My scholarly work has been supported by grants from American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society. I am currently completing my second book, on the temporality of taste in 18th-century British discourse.

Tim Peltason
I teach 19th century and early 20th century British literature; also 20th century and late 19th century American literature; also Shakespeare; and a sampling of the department's 100-level offerings, including Critical Interpretation, Reading Fiction, and others. I have written about Victorian literature-Tennyson, Dickens, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Wilde, and others; about Shakespeare; and about the state of the profession. I am currently at work on a book about the need to restore questions of aesthetic judgment to a central place in the practice of academic literary criticism. In addition to teaching in the English department, I am currently serving a several-year term as the Director of the Newhouse Center for the Humanities.

Lisa Rodensky
I focus on 19th- and 20th-century British literature. My book, The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel (Oxford 2003), attends in particular to the interdisciplinary study of law and literature. I am also the editor of Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu (Penguin 2006). Currently, I am working on a book-length manuscript entitled Novel Judgments: Critical Terms of the 19th- and 20th- Century Novel Review that explores the vocabulary of reviewing. This study moves between two genres – the novel and the periodical review –, and considers the development of key critical terms in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The novel reviews of the 19th and early 20th centuries played a central role in shaping literary-critical terms, and my chapters analyze uses of particular terms in this vital context. "Popular Dickens" -- one chapter of this ongoing work -- will be published in Victorian Literature and Culture. In addition to my work on reviewing, I am editing The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel as well as SirJames Fitzjames Stephen's The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey (also for Oxford). The latter work is a late Victorian legal history in which Stephen takes up both the 18th-century trial (and execution) of Nuncomar (an Indian who worked for the East India Company) and the subsequent impeachment proceedings for judicial murder brought against Elijah Impey, one of the judges who tried Nuncomar.

Larry Rosenwald
What I write about as a scholar: diaries, translation, the relation between words and music, and -- in the last fifteen years this has been my big project -- how American writers, both in English and other languages, depict encounters between languages.

I've also written a number of personal essays -- on war tax resistance and Henry David Thoreau, on translation, on eating breakfast in luncheonettes. I'm a translator from several languages, and a performing musician, both in concerts and on recordings; I've written and performed numerous verse scripts for early music theater pieces; I recently published my first poem, a sestina in memory of my mother, called "On the Streets of Glencoe."

I also teach in the Peace and Justice Studies program at Wellesley.

Some favorite publications and translations:
            Multilingual America:  Language and the Making of American Literature, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press
            “Sestina:  On the Streets of Glencoe (In Memoriam Charlotte Heitlinger Rosenwald, 1921-2004), Colorado Review 34: 1, Spring 2007
            From the Yiddish of Lamed Shapiro,” New Yorkish,” in Leah Garrett ed., The Cross and Other Jewish Stories (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 198-212
            “Notes on Pacifism,” Antioch Review 65:1 (Winter 2007)
            “Burning Words,” in Askold Melnyczuk ed., Conscience, Consequence:  Reflections of Father Daniel Berrigan (Boston: Arrowsmith Press, 2006)
            “On Not Reading in Translation,” Antioch Review 62:2 (Spring 2004)
            “Orwell, Pacifism, Pacifists,” in Thomas Cushman and John Rodden eds.,  George Orwell Into the 21st Century (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004)
            “Four Theses on Translating Yiddish in the 21st Century,” Pakn-Treger 38 (Winter 2002)
            “On Nonviolence and Literature,” Agni 54 (Fall 2001)
            "Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience: Sources, Argument, Influence," in William Cain ed., A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2000)
            From the German of Jeannette Lander:   A Summer in the Week of Itke K. (Chapter II),  Antioch Review 58:2 (Spring 2000)
            “Poetics as Technique,”  Barbara Thornton and Lawrence Rosenwald, in Ross Duffin ed., A Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music (Indiana University Press, 2000)
             From the German of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, with Everett Fox:  Scripture and Translation, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)
            "On Prejudice and Early Music," Historical Performance, Fall 1992
            "On Wartax Resistance," Agni 35 (1992)
            Emerson and the Art of the Diary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)

Margery Sabin
In recent years I have becoming increasingly involved in teaching modern and contemporary literature in English, especially in relation to the periods of British imperialism, anti-colonial nationalism and postcolonial independence. My courses in Irish literature and in Indian literature engage with the dynamic literary responses to these historical forces. These interests inform my recent book, Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765-2000. I also continue to pursue broader interests in nineteenth and twentieth-century English and comparative literature through courses in Victorian and modern fiction and poetry, and courses focused on major writers, such as James Joyce and Henry James. These teaching interests also have been at the core of my two previous books: The Dialect of the Tribe: Speech and Community in Modern Fiction (1987) and English Romanticism and the French Tradition (1976). Recent publications also include articles and reviews about a variety of topics, including the increasing phenomenon of writers migrating between nations, languages, and social class.

In the midst of these new interests, I continue to enjoy introducing students to reading and writing about poetry in the introductory course, Critical Interpretation.

Vernon Shetley
My research concentrates mainly on American poetry and film. My book on contemporary poetry, After the Death of Poetry, appeared in 1993. I’m currently at work on a book about film noir from the 1970s to the present. I'm also interested in the implications of cognitive science for the humanities.


Marilyn Sides
My teaching ranges from creative writing (fiction and travel writing) to the study of and critical writing about literature, both poetry and fiction. My first published story, "The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife," appeared in the 1990 O. Henry Prize Stories collection. A collection of stories, The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife and Other Tales, appeared in 1996 (Harmony) and my first novel, The Genius of Affection (Harmony) was published in August 1999.

Terry Tyler
Teaching: I have not been able to give a useful ranking to my teaching interests. In recent years I've had the chance to teach critical theory, Milton, eighteenth-century literature from Dryden to Burke, Romantic poetry, literature of the so-called "White South" (from Faulkner to Dorothy Allison), and medieval literature (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Wyclif, and Chaucer); beyond that, several years of teaching the survey course have made me a somewhat useful amateur on Spenser, seventeeth century poetry, Joyce, Larkin, Heaney, and Angela Carter.
Research: I'm writing about a "conservatism" in literary theory from Edmund Burke through Coleridge to the Southern New Critics.

Sarah Wall-Randell
My teaching and research interests center on Renaissance literature and its medieval heritage. I’m intrigued by the definitions and practices of literary genre in the Renaissance (mostly because early modern writers themselves were obsessed with genre, its rules, and bending those rules), especially the heterogeneous body of texts that participate in the romance tradition. I am also interested in the cultural history of books as objects, and the real and imaginary uses to which they have been put.

I'm currently working on a book called Imagining the Book in Early Modern England: The Romance of Reading in an Age of Print, and on an evolving project about literary manifestations of the prophetic Sibyls in medieval and Renaissance culture. I've published articles about John Foxe's monumental history of the Protestant church, about the self-writings of the 1540s martyr Anne Askew, and about books in Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus.

After graduating from Wellesley, I did an M.Phil. at Oxford University, and I received my Ph.D. from Harvard in 2005.

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Lisa Easley
Created: November 2006
Last Modified: April 7, 2008