Herman Beavers has taught at Penn since 1989. He is the author of Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson, which was published in 1995 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He also has a chapbook of poems, A Neighborhood of Feeling (1986) from Doris Publications. His most recent poems have appeared in Callaloo, Cross Connect, and Peregrine.  His most recent critical publications deal with the work of Charles Johnson, August Wilson, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.  Professor Beavers teaches courses in African American and American literature, including courses on Southern Modernism, 20th Century African American Poetry, and "Trading Fours:  The LIteratures of Jazz," which is a requisite course in the Jazz and Popular Music minor.  He also teaches the introductory poetry workshop in the Creative Writing Program.    Professor Beavers believes that his courses are much more about  (more...)

Charles Bernstein teaches poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on modernist and contemporary art, aesthetics, and performance.

Bernstein has published three collections of essays — My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999), A Poetics (Harvard, 1992), and Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon, 1985; rpt Northwestern, 2001). He is the author of over twenty collections of poetry, including Girly Man (Chicago, 2006), With Strings (Chicago, 2001), Republics of Reality: 1975 - 1995 (Sun & Moon, 2000), Dark City (Sun & Moon, 1994), The Sophist (Sun & Moon, 1987; rpt Salt Publishing 2004), Islets/Irritations (Jordan Davies, 1983; rpt. Roof Books, 1992); and Controlling Interests (Roof, 1980). Hislibretto Shadowtime, for composer Brian Ferneyhough, was published in 2005 by Green Integer; it was performed as part of the 2005 Lincoln   (more...)

Max Cavitch joined Penn's faculty in 1999, after receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Rutgers.  He teaches all forms and phases of American literature from the beginnings of English contact and settlement to the present day.  His teaching and research interests also include gender and sexuality studies, historical poetics, and cinema.  His book American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. He has also published essays on a variety of topics in the journals American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Screen, and Victorian Poetry.  He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the Penn Humanities Forum, and Cornell's Society for the  (more...)

Stuart Curran received his BA and MA from the University of Michigan and his PhD from Harvard. Before coming to Penn he taught at Wisconsin and John Hopkins. He has held fellowships from the Huntington Library, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Author of two critical studies of Shelley, as well as the standard bibliography on the poet, he was also for many years the editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal.  He now serves as President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.   He has written a history of Romanticism, Poetic Form and British Romanticism  has edited the Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, which is currently being revised.  He served for many years as section editor (1740-1830) for The Brown University Women Writers Project text base and publications, of which his edition of The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford University Press, 1993) was an early result; is preparing a  hypertext edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for internet  (more...)

Alan Filreis has published several books on the literary politics of modern poetry, a new edition of the radical 1943 novel Tucker's People by Ira Wolfert (Illinois, 1998) an edition of Wallace Stevens's correspondence with Jose Rodriguez Feo (Secretaries of the Moon, 1986), and articles on modern poetry and painting, and the literary and cultural politics of the 1950s. Stevens and the Actual World, a literary biography of Wallace Stevens, was published by Princeton University Press in 1991. Another book, Modernism from Right to Left, was published by Cambridge University Press (1994). Filreis is currently writing a literary history of the American 1950s called The Fifties' Thirties, a study of anticommunist attacks on modern poetry. Aside from teaching modern American poetry, he has offered a series of courses on twentieth-century American decades, and another on the literature of the Holocaust. He is a winner of the Lindback and Ira Abrams Awards for Distinguished  (more...)

Michael Gamer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge, 2000). He is currently at work on two books: Recollections in Tranquility: The Collected Author and the Institutionalization of Romanticism; and A History of British Theatre: Staged Conflicts, under contract with Blackwell Publishing. He is editor of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (Penguin, 2002) and Charlotte Smith's Manon L'Escaut and the Romance of Real Life (Pickering and Chatto, 2005). He works on collaboration and is fond of collaborative work: with Jeffrey Cox he edited The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Broadview, 2003); with Dahlia Porter Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800 (Broadview, 2008). He has also published essays in MLQ, PMLA, Novel, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in  (more...)

Suvir Kaul received his B. A. (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, and his Ph. D. from Cornell University. His first job was at the SGTB Khalsa College in Delhi; since then, he has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at Stanford University, and at the Jamia Milia Islamia as a Visiting Professor. He has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Canterbury at Kent and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He teaches courses in Eighteenth-century British Literature, Contemporary South Asian Writing in English, and in Literary and Critical Theory. He has published three books, Eighteenth-century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (University Press of Virginia, 2000; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology  (more...)

Josephine Park is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Studies Program. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley, and she specializes in twentieth-century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on American Orientalism and Asian American literature. Her book Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008) reads a history of American literary alliances with East Asia, from Walt Whitman to Myung Mi Kim. Her present research examines Asian American subjectivities shaped by twentieth-century conflicts between the United States and East Asia. Her teaching interests include minority literature, American poetry, modernist poetics, theories of race and subject formation, immigration, and transnationalism.

Bob Perelman has published over 15 volumes of poetry, most recently The Future of Memory (Roof Books) and Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press). His critical work focuses on poetry and modernism. His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton University Press) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (University of California Press). He has edited Writing/Talks (Southern Illinois University Press), a collection of talks by poets.

Melissa E. Sanchez received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. She studies and teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and history, and she is particularly interested in gender studies, constitutional and religious historiography, and early modern political theory. She has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library, and her articles have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Sidney Journal, the Huntington Library Quarterly, English Literary History, English Literary Renaissance, and Studies in Philology. Her current book project, entitled Erotic Subjects in English Literature from Sidney to Milton, examines the political import of the perverse and ambivalent erotic relations depicted in early modern literature. She has also recently begun a second book-length project on the intersections of kinship, property, sexuality, and political loyalty in sixteenth- and  (more...)

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania.

A graduate of McGill University who took her MPhil and PhD from Yale, Dr. Steiner's fields are modern literature and critical theory, relations between visual and verbal art, and the contemporary novel. Her book The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (University of Chicago Press) was listed by the New York Times among the "100 Best Books of 1996." Her latest book is Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art (Free Press), published in Europe as The Trouble with Beauty (Heinemann). Other publications include Postmodern Fictions: 1970-1990, volume 8 of the Cambridge History of American Literature, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and  (more...)