Meredith McGill

mlmcgill@rci.rutgers.edu

Meredith McGill is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis.  She is the author of /American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-53/, a study of nineteenth-century American resistance to tight control over intellectual property.  This book charts the effect of a decentralized mass-market for print on the development of a national literature, with particular focus on the writing and careers of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  She recently edited a collection of essays, /The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange/, in which a variety of scholars seek to model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry within a transatlantic frame.  She is currently working on a study of the circulation of poetry in the antebellum United States.  Her research interests include the history of the book in American culture, American poetry and poetics, law and literature, literary theory, new media, and the history of media shift.

Lynn Festa

lmfesta@rci.rutgers.edu

Lynn Festa is an Associate Professor of English. She is author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and co-editor of The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Life and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, as well as in essay collections. Recent and forthcoming publications include a survey of the comparative study of empire and sentimentalism for Literature Compass; the introduction, authored with Dan Carey, to The Postcolonial Enlightenment; and several articles on the relationship between subjectivity, property, and the possession of things in an array of eighteenth-century texts and contexts.

She is currently working on a new book project, The Personality of Things in Eighteenth-Century Britain, which addresses how eighteenth-century representations of circulating goods and bodies unsettle the boundaries between subjects and objects, persons and things in eighteenth-century Britain.

Colin Jager

colin.jager@rutgers.edu

Professor Jager is the author of The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Recent articles include: "Byron and Romantic Occidentalism" Romantic Circles Praxis, August 2008; "A Poetics of Dissent; or, Pantisocracy in America," Theory and Event 10.1 (2007); "After the Secular: The Subject of Romanticism," Public Culture 18.2 (2006); "Mansfield Park and the End of Natural Theology," Modern Language Quarterly 63:1 (2002); "Natural Designs: Romanticism, Secularism, Theory," European Romantic Review 12.1 (2001). He has forthcoming essays on Romanticism and Consciousness and on the philosopher Charles Taylor. In 2006 and 2007 he was the co-director of the "Mind and Culture" working group at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. He is at work on a book on secularism and romanticism tentatively titled
After Secularism.

Jonathan Kramnick

kramnick@gmail.com

Professor Kramnick's research and teaching is in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, philosophical approaches to literature, and cognitive science and the arts. He is the author most recently of Actions and Objects, from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford University Press, 2010). This book brings together his interests in questions of intention, mind, and material objects during the long eighteenth century. His previous publications include Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and many articles on the literature, philosophy, and science of the long eighteenth century. His next book will be on the problem of consciousness.

He is currently the co-director of the Center for Cultural Analysis's 2009-2010 program on Evidence and Explanation in the Arts and Sciences and from 2006-2008 was the co-director of the CCA's program on Mind and Culture. Both projects were designed to investigate connections between the humanities and the sciences.

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the William Andrew Clark Memorial Library.

John Kucich

jkucich@rci.rutgers.edu

Professor Kucich is the author of Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton University Press, 2006); The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Cornell University Press, 1994); Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (University of California Press, 1987); Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens (University of Georgia Press, 1981). He also edited Fictions of Empire (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), and co-edited Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Humanities Endowment Fellowship, and the Donald Gray Prize for Best Essay in Victorian Studies (North American Victorian Studies Association).

Kate Flint
flint.kate@gmail.com

Professor Kate Flint, Chair of the English Department, taught at Bristol and Oxford Universities before moving to Rutgers in 2001. Her research spans the C19th and C20th, and is both interdisciplinary and transatlantic in focus. Trained at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, her areas of specialization include Victorian and early twentieth-century cultural and literary history, visual culture, women's writing, gender studies, and transatlantic studies. Most recently, Professor Flint has published The Transatlantic Indian 1776-1930 (Princeton University Press, 2008), which looks at the two-way relations between Native Americans and the British in the long C19th, exploring questions of modernity, nationhood, performance, popular culture, and the impacts of travel. Her previous works include The Victorians and The Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (Oxford University Press, 1993), both of which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize, as well as Dickens (Harvester, 1985). She is General Editor of the Victorian volume of the New Cambridge History of English Literature (forthcoming 2010) and has co-edited Culture, Landscape and the Environment (Oxford University Press, 2000), and edited Victorian Love Stories (Oxford University Press, 1996) as well as a number of works by Dickens, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and Anthony Trollope for Penguin Classics and OUP World's Classics. Additionally, Professor Flint has published articles on Victorian, modernist and contemporary fiction, and on women's writing and feminist theory, painting, and cultural history. She has recently held Fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Huntington Library, San Marino, and is working on a new book provisionally entitled "Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination." Her other current research project explores connections between gender, subjectivity, and literary and artistic form between 1885-1930: an essay related to this, “ ‘The hour of pink twilight:’ lesbian poetics and the politics of queer encounter in the fin-de-siècle street is forthcoming in Victorian Studies (summer 2009).

Henry Turner

henry.turner@rutgers.edu

Professor Turner is the author of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-1630 (Oxford, 2006) and the editor of The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2002). His work appears in The Norton Anthology of Drama (forthcoming 2009), The History of Cartography, Vol. III: Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago, 2007), Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England's First Professional Writer (Ashgate, 2007), Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, ELH, and other journals.  He is series co-editor with Mary Thomas Crane of Scientific and Literary Cultures of Early Modernity (Ashgate), and book review editor of The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal.  

Professor Turner has recently completed Shakespeare's Double Helix, a contribution to the "Shakespeare Now!" series published by Continuum Press (February 2008). Focusing on A Midsummer Night's Dream, the book explores the relationship between poetic and scientific discourses in early modern England and how the play sheds light on 21st century accounts of human and artificial life in philosophy, biotechnology, and American political culture.  He is currently at work on several projects: The Corporate Commonwealth, a book-length study of the concept of the "corporation," including early modern philosophies of industry, technology, and economy and their relationship to notions of political community and political subjectivity; assorted essays on narration and value in Richard Hakluyt, on 16th century humanism and economic thought, and on Shakespeare, cybernetics, and posthuman "life"; and a special issue of Configurations: Journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts devoted to "Mathematics and the Imagination," guest-edited with Arielle Saiber (Italian, Bowdoin College). 

At Rutgers, Professor Turner teaches courses on Renaissance drama and theories of everyday life, on French Structuralism and its legacy, on Ben Jonson, and on philosophies of "Life" from Plato to the present.  He currently directs the Program in Early Modern Studies (PEMS) at the CCA.

Rebecca Walkowitz

rebecca.walkowitz@rutgers.edu

Professor Walkowitz is the author of Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006; paperback 2007), which was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2008 Perkins Prize, and editor or co-editor of seven books, including Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization (2007), Bad Modernisms (with Douglas Mao, 2006), and The Turn to Ethics (with Marjorie Garber and Beatrice Hanssen, 2000). Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in several anthologies and in journals such as PMLA, NOVEL, Modern Language Quarterly, ELH, and Modern Drama.  A trustee of the Joseph Conrad Society and a member of the Executive Committee of the MLA Division on Twentieth-Century English Literature, she is a co-editor of the journal Contemporary Literature and the incoming Programs Chair of the Modernist Studies Association..  At Rutgers, she is the organizer of the Modernism & Globalization Seminar Series.

Professor Walkowitz's diverse teaching and research areas include the twentieth- and twenty-first-century British, Irish, and Anglophone novel, modernism, the new world literature, translation and the history of the book, and narrative theory. In addition, she is interested in issues of cosmopolitanism, postcolonial theory, Englishness and Jewishness, and U. S. literature and culture after 1945. She is currently at work on After the National Paradigm: Translation, Comparison, and the New World Literature, a project that considers the effects of globalization on national paradigms of literary culture and argues for the emergence of new forms of "comparative writing" in contemporary transnational literature. Recent and forthcoming publications include an article in NOVEL on Kazuo Ishiguro, translation, and the new world literature; an article in PMLA, authored with Douglas Mao, on "the new modernist studies"; and a book chapter in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel on "The Post-Consensus Novel: Minority Culture, Multiculturalism, and Transnational Comparison."