Kathleen Brogan

Associate Professor of English

Contact
Phone:
+1 (781) 283-2588
Email:
kbrogan@wellesley.edu
Department
English & Creative Writing

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
  • Ph.D., Yale University

Current and upcoming courses

Gotham: New York City in Literature, Art, and Film

ENG258

This course examines how that icon of modernity, New York City, has been 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, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, Berenice Abbott, Andre D. Wagner, and others. We’ll close the semester with films set in New York.

(AMST 258 and ENG 258 are cross-listed courses.)

  • Critical Interpretation

    ENG120

    English 120 introduces students to a level of interpretative sophistication and techniques of analysis essential not just in literary study but in all courses that demand advanced engagement with language. In active discussions, sections perform detailed readings of poetry drawn from a range of historical periods, with the aim of developing an understanding of the richness and complexity of poetic language and of connections between form and content, text and cultural and historical context. The reading varies from section to section, but all sections involve learning to read closely and to write persuasively and elegantly.