Kathleen Brogan
Associate Professor of English
Teaches modernism, contemporary American fiction and poetry, ethnic literature, and urban literature and photography.
I teach courses in modernism, contemporary American fiction and poetry, ethnic literature, and urban literature and photography. My book, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Fiction, examines how ghost stories in ethnic literature reflect the way shared group histories are recalled and reshaped. I am now working on a study of how cities are depicted in American literature and art.
Education
- B.A., Queens College
- M.A., Yale University
- M.Phil., Yale University
- Ph.D., Yale University
Currently teaching
This course examines how that icon of modernity, New York City, has been variously depicted in literature and the arts, from its evolution into the nation’s cultural and financial capital in the nineteenth century to the present. We’ll consider how urban reformers, boosters, long-time residents, immigrants, tourists, newspaper reporters, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have shaped new and often highly contested meanings of this dynamic and diverse city. We'll also consider how each vision of the city returns us to crucial questions of perspective, identity, and ownership, and helps us to understand the complexity of metropolitan experience. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Paule Marshall, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, and Berenice Abbott, and others. Filmmakers may include Vincente Minnelli, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee.
(AMST 258 and ENG 258 are cross-listed courses.)-
Poetics of the Body
ENG248
Sensual and emotionally powerful, American poetry of the body explores living and knowing through physical, bodily experience. From Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” to contemporary spoken word performances, body poems move us through the strangeness and familiarity of embodiment, voicing the manifold discomforts, pains, pleasures, and ecstasies of living in and through bodies. We’ll trace a number of recurring themes: the relationship between body and mind, female embodiment, queer bodies, race, sexuality, disability, illness and medicine, mortality, appetite, and the poem itself as a body. Poets include Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Rita Dove, Thom Gunn, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, Tyehimba Jess, Jos Charles, Max Ritvo, Laurie Lambeth, Chen Chen, and Danez Smith. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement. (AMST 248 and ENG 248 are cross-listed courses.)