FALL SEMESTER 2011
Secretary: Geri Pawelek, 888-2650, 916 in Churchill Tower
Full-Time Faculty:
Robert Butler, PhDOffice: Tower 904
Phone: 888-2658
Office Hours: MWF 2:30-3:30 and TR 12:30-2:30
Dr. Butler's book The Richard Wright Encyclopedia, co-authored with Jerry Ward of Dillard University, appeared in 2008 with Greenwood Press. Dr. Butler's recent publications include "Richard Wright and the South Side Writers' Group" in Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance, edited by Steven Tracy (University of Illinois Press) and "Richard Wright's Political Vision" in Richard Wright in the Twenty-First Century edited by William Dow (Palgrave/Macmillan Press). "Richard Wright's Use of his Southern Religious Background in Black Boy/American Hunger" just appeared in Literature and Belief and "Richard Wright's 'Between the World and Me' and the Chapel Scene in Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage: A Literary Relationship" will appear in the fall 2011 issue of College Language Association Journal. In June 2008, Dr. Butler chaired a panel and delivered a paper at the Richard Wright Centennial Conference in Paris. He also chaired a session on Wright's poetry at the CLA Convention in South Carolina in April 2011.
In 2010, Dr. Butler was inducted into the St. Michael's College Academic Hall of Fame.
Dr. Butler's teaching interests include modern American literature, especially realism and naturalism, African-American literature and culture, 19th-century Russian literature, and such authors as Mark Twain, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Theodore Dresier, James T. Farrell, and Toni Morrison.
He is the inaugural recipient of the 2008 Honors Professor of the Year Award. The award recognizes a professor who has made exceptional contributions to the Canisius All-College Honors Program in teaching, scholarship and/or service. To learn more, click here.
Rita Capezzi, PhDOffice: Tower 1112
Phone: 888-2886 capezzir@canisius.edu
Office Hours: M 2:30-4, TR 1:30-3, and by appointment
Dr. Capezzi teaches FYS 101, ENG 101, and ENG 299 Introduction to Literature Studies, where she emphasizes strongly the development of productive reading and writing strategies. She has also begun teaching online, with ENG 101 as her first effort. This year she is also advising First Year majors in English and Creative Writing.
Recent courses include HON 346 Literary Mathematics and Mathematical Literature (team taught with Dr. Christine Kinsey of the Math Department) and ENG 285 Writing and Animal Studies (an Advanced Writing-designated course in the core curriculum designed for the ABEC program). Other courses include: ENG 319 Reading Big Books, ENG 324 Reading and Writing in Early America, ENG 315 American Literature I, ENG 210 Mothers in Literature and Film, ENG 207 Word and Image, and ENG 203 Culture and Identity. Among Dr. Capezzi's teaching interests are African-American women writers, gender studies, 19th- and early 20th-century American literature, the history of reading and writing instruction in early America, discourses of domesticity, verbal-visual texts and William Blake.
Dr. Capezzi has published on Melville's "Benito Cereno," and her scholarly works in progress include articles on Melville and periodical publications, readers of the Harper's Bazaar, 19th-century American domestic scrapbooks, and the discourse of domesticity in 19th-century American periodicals and literature.
New research projects include work on patterns of advanced language study since the elimination of the foreign language requirement in the Core Curriculum, Core Curriculum change in the context of the history of Jesuit education, and challenges of retaining well-prepared but under-motivated students. She works on these projects in collaboration with faculty and staff in the Departments of Sociology, Education, and Student Success and Retention.
In the past, Dr. Capezzi served as the Director of the Core Curriculum, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, and Director of Academic Advising.
Mick Cochrane, PhDDirector of Creative Writing Office: Tower 901
Phone: 888-2662
cochrane@canisius.edu
Office hours: MTWRF 10-11 and by appointment
Dr. Cochrane is the author of three novels: Flesh Wounds (Nan Talese/Doubleday), Sport (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins), and The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (Knopf). His essays and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Five Points, Cincinnati Review, Northwest Review, Kansas Quarterly, Water~stone, Biography, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. He teaches introduction to creative writing, fiction writing, writing for young adults, literary publishing, and contemporary fiction. He has three times been named Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching Professor. He is a Lowery Writer-in-Residence and directs the creative writing program.
Mick Cochrane’s Home Page.
Sandra Cookson, PhDOffice: Tower 909
Phone: 888-2653
cookson@canisius.edu
Office Hours: MWF 9-9:30 & 2-3 and TR by apppointment
Dr. Cookson’s specialty is modern and contemporary American poetry. Her interests in literature have focused on women’s writing, on British and European writers, as well as American and European poetry in translation. She has taught creative writing at all levels in poetry, and prose and poetry at the introductory level. Her own poems have been published in a variety of literary magazines and journals. A chapbook of poems, Two Loons Taken for Vultures, has recently been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press.
Recent teaching interests: English Honors seminar in novels of Dostoevsky. Other interests: music, singing. Languages: French, Italian, and recently, study of Russian.
Jack D'Amico, PhDOffice: CT 914
Phone: 888-2663
d'amico@canisius.edu
Dr. D'Amico's areas of interest, teaching, and publication include Shakespeare, English and Italian Renaissance drama and theater, Machiavelli, Byron, and swimming.
Dr. D'Amico's most recent publications and presentations include: The Moor in English Renaissance Drama, University of South Florida Press, October, 1991, newly available on line, with an excerpt included in Literature Criticism from 1400-1800, ed. Schoenberg & Trudeau, vol. 137 (2007), 342-353. Dr. D'Amico recently presented “Byron and the Carbonari of Ravenna” at the 25th International Byron Conference on “Lord Byron and History” held in Missolonghi Greece, September 2009 and presented on “Byron and Naples” at the American Society for 18th Century Studies conference in Vancouver, March 2011. He recently traveled to Naples to study and complete work on a unique Roman theater that includes a pool. An essay on that theater, “Pausilypon: Theater of Pleasure,” appeared in Vol. 45 (nos. 175-176) of Italian Quarterly. In September, 2011 he attended a production of Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus at the Globe Theater in London and plans to teach that play (Spring 2012) as part of a course on Marlowe,Shakespeare and Jonson.
 |
Office: Tower 907
Phone: 888-2681
desider1@canisius.edu
Office hours: M 12-3, TR 2:30-3:30, and by appointment
Dr. Desiderio's major teaching area is early American literature, throughout the 19th century, and particularly, the literature of the Early Republic and antebellum America. Her interests include the American novel, the profession of authorship in America, and race and gender in American literature more broadly. Her recent classes have included English 319: American Renaissance, English 319: Captivity Narratives, and English 396: The Rise of the Early American Novel.
Her articles include "The Periodical as Monitorial and Interactive Space in Judith Sargent Murray's 'The Gleaner'" in American Periodicals (2008) and "Cultivating Cultural Cohesion in Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel" in Studies in American Fiction (forthcoming October 2011). She is serving as the co-editor of a collection of essays on Susanna Rowson, entitled Beyond Charlotte Temple: New Approaches to Susanna Rowson, appearing in the journal Studies in American Fiction. She is also the co-editor of the Broadview edition of Hannah Webster Foster's American novels, The Coquette and The Boarding School. She has delivered papers on topics ranging from gossip in the eighteenth century to Charles Brockden Brown's sentimental novels.
Jane Fisher, PhDOffice: Tower 908
Phone: 888-2112
fisher@canisuis.edu
Office Hours: TR 1:30-2:30, W 12-3, and by appointment
Dr. Fisher regularly teaches lower-level courses in fairy and folk tales in literature and film. Her teaching interests include literary representations of illness and disease as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, especially literary modernism, and women's literature. She has taught Honors courses in literary criticism; Virginia Woolf; and Literature, Illness, and Disease.
Dr. Fisher's book entitled Women's Narratives of the 1918 Influenza: Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War is forthcoming from Palgrave/Macmillan press. Dr. Fisher has presented conference papers and published articles on a range of topics from film studies to Toni Morrison, with the majority of her work concentrated on Virginia Woolf. Dr. Fisher is Director of the Women's Studies Program.
Eric GansworthOffice: Tower 902
Phone: 888-2113
ganswore@canisius.edu
Office Hours: M 1:00-5:00, T 1:00-2:00, and by appointment
Professor Gansworth is a Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius. His interests range from authors including William S. Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, Lynda Barry, George Singleton, Stephen King, Raymond Carver, Joy Harjo, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Stewart O'Nan and Patricia Smith to graphic novels, contemporary Native American literature, memoir, film adaptations of literature, interdisciplinary studies, and fiction, poetry and memoir writing.
Professor Gansworth is the author of nine books. His most recent book, Extra Indians, a novel, won an American Book Award, from the Before Columbus Foundation, and a Book of the Year Award from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA). Extra Indians also received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. He was recently commissioned by Northern Ohio University to write a one-act play, "Rabbit Dance," which received a full production for their International Theater Festival. SUNY Oneonta commissioned Gansworth's first multi-media performance piece, "Home Fires and Reservation Roads," which was coordinated with a career-retrospective exhibit of his visual art. His play, "Re-Creation Story," was part of the Native Theater Festival at the Public Theater in New York City. His collection of poems and paintings was voted to the Number 3 position on the National Book Critics Circle "Good Reads" List for Spring, 2008. His novel Mending Skins won the 2006 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award in the novel category.
Eric Gansworth's Home Page
Rachel Greenberg, PhDOffice: Tower 910
Phone: 888-2473
greenber@canisius.edu
Office Hours: M 11-12:30 and T 2:30-4
Dr. Greenberg specializes in 16th and 17th century English literature with a focus on intersections of gender and class. Her dissertation focuses on how categories of labor and gender influence one another as shown in representations of women's work in early modern literature. Her primary teaching and research interests lie in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Shakespeare and film, Renaissance women’s writing, as well as commonwealth literature. Current and future courses include Shakespeare, Early Modern Women Writers, Vampires in Literature and Culture, as well as general education courses like FYS and English 101. Current projects include articles on the popular voice in early modern drama and the status of women's writing as work or leisure in the 16th century.
Jean Gregorek, PhD
Office: Tower 912
Phone: 888-2621
gregorej@canisius.edu
Office Hours: MW 2:45-4:30 and F by appointment
Dr Jean Gregorek specializes in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Literature and Postcolonial Literature and Film. She teaches courses in Postcolonial Studies, the British Novel, Literature of Imperialism, Literary Modernisms, Detective Fiction, Travel Writing, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her professional interests encompass various forms of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century literature and popular culture. Jean has presented papers on works by canonical novelists and on such topics as Victorian melodrama, American country music, postcolonial documentary, business success manuals, and the adjunctification of contemporary universities. Her research agenda for the past few years has focused on the cultural history of British imperialism, and these scholarly endeavors have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Association, among others. A former Associate Professor at Antioch College, Jean also served as an Arthur E. Morgan Fellow there, and as a program consultant to the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities at The Ohio State University.
Jean's publications include an essay on American Depression-era pulp fiction in the collection Delights, Desires, and Dilemmas: Essays on Women and the Media; an essay on the novelist George Gissing and Nietzschean philosophy in the journal Nineteenth-Century Studies, and an essay for the exhibition catalog “Made in Prison: Contemporary Art by Incarcerated Men and Women.” Recent talks and writings have dealt with the formidable challenges facing liberal arts colleges and the humanities in general and versions have appeared in Academe, The Journal of Academic Freedom, and Works and Days.
Mark Hodin, PhDEnglish Department Chair
Office: Tower 905
Phone: 888-2659
hodinm@canisius.edu
Office Hours: MWF 1-3 and by appointment
Mark Hodin is the Chair of the English department. He studies twentieth-century American theater, especially where questions of literary value intersect with cultural performance. He has published articles on vaudeville, theater reviewing, and university pedagogy. His “The Disavowal of Ethnicity: Legitimate Theater and the Social Construction of Literary Value in Turn of the Century America” (Theatre Journal 52.2 (May 2000) was awarded the 2001 Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize by the American Society for Theatre Research. Recent publications include “Lorraine Hansberry's Absurdity: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window” in Contemporary Literature 50.4 (Winter 2009): 742-774; "Mobility in Immigrant New York" in American Literary History 23.2 (Summer 2011); and "Late Melodrama" in Oxford Handbook of American Drama, ed. Jeffrey Richards, New York: Oxford University Press (forthcoming, January 2012). His current scholarly project "'All that glisters is not gold': David Belasco's Merchant of Venice (1922)" is a contribution to a book project exploring Jewish responses to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Dr. Hodin's chapter analyzes Belasco's production in the context of Jewish assimilation and American modernism.
Dr. Hodin's classes include First Year Seminar, Writing About Literature, Drama, Introduction to English Studies, and a course in US Cold War culture.
Away from work, he enjoys Tae Kwon Do, softball, and running his two greyhounds.
Janet McNallyOffice: Tower 302
Phone: 888-2939
mcnallyj@canisius.edu
Office Hours: TWR 12:15-1:15 and by appointment
Janet McNally holds a bachelor's degree in English from Canisius and a master's in fine arts from the University of Notre Dame. In 2008 she was among 18 fiction writers from New York State to receive the prestigious New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship. She has stories and poems published or forthcoming in a number of literary magazines, including Crab Orchard Review, Confrontation, Poet Lore, Gettysburg Review, and North American Review; and is currently at work on her first novel.
McNally's teaching interests include fiction and poetry writing, contemporary poetry, and modern American fiction.
Rev. James Pribek, S.J.Office: Tower 913
Phone: 888-3725
pribekj@canisius.edu
ON SABBATICAL FALL 2011
Fr. James Pribek holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Onsager University, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, and University College Dublin. A specialist in Irish Literature, his dissertation traced the influence on Cardinal John Henry Newman on James Joyce. More recent research has focused on Fr. Joseph Darlington, a Jesuit converted by Newman who served alongside Hopkins and eventually became the teacher of James Joyce. He has also examined Newman’s influence on a number of twentieth-century writers in Ireland and the U.S. His courses include English Seminar I, Honors Literature II, and Introduction to English Studies, Irish Literature, Modern Irish Drama, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Nineteenth-Century British Literature.
Thomas C. Reber, PhDOffice: Tower 911
Phone: 888-2629
rebert@canisius.edu
Office Hours: MWF 10:15-11:15, M 2:15-3, and by appointment
Dr. Reber's main interests are in rhetoric and composition, science fiction, and the Core Curriculum. He advises students in the English Department's Writing Minor. In 2005, he completed a three-year term as Director of the Core Curriculum, where he initiated a new process for assessing the quality of the Core.
His recent research on the debate about what kind of new Peace Bridge should be built has led him to investigate the history of the bridge. Currently, he is researching and writing a biographical article on Alonzo C. Mather, who tried in the 1890's to get government approval for an electricity-producing bridge at the site of the current Peace Bridge.
Earlier research has included a paper on the Peace Bridge debate of the 1990's and an article on the use of electronic discussion in literature courses.
Lindsey Row-HeyveldOffice: Tower 915
Phone: 888-2646
rowheyvl@canisius.edu
Office Hours: T 1-3 and R 10-11:30
Dr. Row-Heyveld specializes in early modern English literature, especially early modern drama, and disability studies. Her research focuses on performances of disability, both on the stage and off, in 16th- and 17th-century England. Her current research project, Dissembling Disability, examines the theatrical tradition of able-bodied characters feigning disability in early modern drama. It investigates the literary, religious, and social components of that tradition, as well as its effects on the development of disability as a category of identity. She enjoys teaching everything from Shakespeare to X-Men and is looking forward to offering courses on Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists; crime and poverty in early modern England; monsters in medieval and early modern literature; and discourses of disability in literature and culture.
Ken Sroka, PhD
Office: Tower 912
Phone: 888-2661
Ninteenth century British literature, especially Charles Dickens and the novel, drama, and myth and literature are some of Dr. Sroka's interests.
He has published a number of articles on teaching, Walter Scott, Dickens, and other 19th-Century Literature. Most recently, an article entitled, “Beauties, Beasts, and Myth in Frankenstein (1818) and The Time Machine (1895),” was published in Literature and Belief (Brigham Young University).
Dr. Sroka is also the co-creator, with E. Roger Stephenson, Phd, of the Urban Leadership Learning Community at Canisius. The cooperative learning program was recently recognized for excellence in diversity in education by the University of San Francisco Jesuit Network for Equitable Excellence in Higher Education (JNEE). To read more about it, click here. He has also received awards from
the Buffalo Board of Education (2008, 2009) and the Minority Bar Association of Western New York (2009) for Achievements in Education.
Roger Stephenson, PhDOffice: Tower 906
Phone: 888-2655
stephene@canisius.edu
Office hours: MW 10-1 and TR 11:30-2
Dr. Stephenson is interested in American literature, the Civil War in art and literature, playwriting, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the Twenties.
Dr. Stephenson is also the co-creator, with Ken Sroka, Phd, of the Urban Leadership Learning Community at Canisius. The cooperative learning program was recently recognized for excellence in diversity in education by
the University of San Francisco Jesuit Network for Equitable Excellence
in Higher Education (JNEE). To read more about it, click here.
Amy Wolf, PhDOffice: Tower 903
Phone: 888-2627
wolfa@canisius.edu
Office Hours: M 10-12, W 2-3:30, and by appointment
Recent publications by Dr. Wolf include “Bernard Mandeville, Fielding’s Amelia, and the Necessities of Plot” in The Eighteenth-Century Novel and “Epistolarity, Narrative, and the Fallen Woman in Mansfield Park” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She currently contributes to The Scriblerian as the Eliza Haywood editor.
Dr. Wolf teaches classes in the field of eighteenth-century British literature and first-year composition and literature. Recent courses include Jane Austen, British Women Writers, Introduction to English Studies, History of the Novel I, and The Coffeehouse Culture of Eighteenth-Century England, for which she won an award for innovative course design from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.