Courses Recently Taught:

• Blake, Whitman and Ginsberg: Poets of Prophecy
• The Odyssey through the Ages
• Irish Literature, Modern Irish Literature
• Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Literature
• The Eighteenth-Century Novel
• The British Romantics
• Senior Seminar
• Textual Editing and New Media
• Postcolonial Literature
• Introduction to Literary Studies
• British Literature I
• British Literature II

Fall 2009

On sabbatical.

Spring 2010

In Angers, France.

• Expatriate Literature
• Introduction to Creative Writing

Irish Literature and Modern Irish Literature both move towards a study of contemporary Irish writing. Irish Literature is an upper division course that begins with the 1800 Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent. It moves on through works by W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon. Modern Irish Literature is part of the Cultural Foundations sequence. It usually begins in the 20th century with a few stories by Joyce, and then moves on through many of the same writers, but emphasizes modern works by Anne Devlin, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright, as well as looking at films such as The Crying Game and The Snapper.

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The Odyssey through the Ages reads Homer in various translations over the centuries, beginning with George Chapman's Elizabethan version, moving on to Alexander Pope's 18th-century translation and closing with Roberts Fagles's modern re-creation. The course then moves on to work through James Joyce's Ulysses and Derek Walcott's Omeros to examine how the Modern and postmodern world has re-cast Homer's epic.

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Restoration & Eighteenth Century Literature covers the period from the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 up to the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. Major writers of the period include Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Samuel Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft.

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The Eighteenth Century Novel looks at work of prose fiction in English from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko through the novels of the 1770s and '80s by Laurence Sterne and Frances Burney.

We look at Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, often argued to be the first modern novel, major works by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, and several texts that have received more attention as a result of feminist scholarship, such as Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, Sarah Fielding's Adventures of David Simple and later works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams.