(Associate Professor, Folklore) received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of a book on African-American men's poetry, Deep Down in the Jungle. He helped to create the field of modern folklore study, specifically the performance-theory style of research, which moved to study folklore not as isolated texts but as socially- contexted expressive events. He continues to work on African-American folklore of various kinds, and has recently been interested in the theory and study of display events (festivals, protests) and of marketplace culture. He also continues to work on the development and history of folklore theory. He teaches classes on Festival Theatre on behalf of the Theatre Arts Program.

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...)

Nancy Bentley received her Ph.D. from Harvard with a specialization in American literature and culture. She also teaches and publishes in the areas of law and literature, African-American literature, and modern social theory.

Much of Bentley’s scholarship explores the role of the imagination as an active component of the social. Her first book, The Ethnography of Manners (1995), examines fiction and ethnography as related forms for analyzing social life. In 2005 her book High Literary Forms and Mass Culture was published in Volume 3 or the Cambridge History of American Literature. She is currently completing a study entitled Kinship and Wayward Affiliation in the American Novel, 1850-1913. This book explores the way writers imagined an “Americanization” of kinship, the view that life in the New World (the American continent and the West Indies) posed the danger––or the  (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...)

Peter Conn is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1983; paperback editions, 1988 and 2008), and Literature in America (Cambridge University Press, 1989), which was a main selection of Associated Book Clubs (UK). Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, 1996; Paperback 1998), was chosen as a "New York Times Notable Book," was included among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, and received the Athenaeum Award.

Conn's next book, The American 1930s: A Literary History, will be published by Cambridge in 2008. His books and chapters have been translated into eight languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Romanian, and Korean. He has lectured at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum, and other institutions, on a number of  (more...)

Timothy Corrigan is a Professor of English, Cinema Studies, and History of Art at Penn. His work in Cinema Studies has focused on modern American and international cinema, as well as pedagogy and film. Books include New German Film: The Displaced Image, The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, Writing about Film, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, and The Film Experience (co-authored with Patricia White). Currently he is completing a book-length study titled “The Essay Film from Montaigne to Marker” and, with Patricia White, an anthology of film theory titled “Critical Visions: Readings in Classical and Contemporary Film and Media Theory.” He is also an editor of the journal Adaptation, an editorial board member of Cinema Journal, and a founding director of the Association  (more...)

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English, received her Ph.D. from Boston University. Her teaching areas include African American literature and Southern literature with an emphasis on issue of race, region, and gender. Her research interests are interdisciplinary: geography and African American writers; photography and Southern women; film and literary modernism; visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance; civil rights law and narrative fiction.

She is the author of Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (2003), Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994; paper 1996) and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (1982), and the editor of numerous reference texts, including the Penguin Classic editions of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1997) and Quicksand (2002), and the co-edited Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1992). She is currently writing a  (more...)

Peter Decherney is the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focus on the history of media regulation and on internet policy, specifically the interaction between Hollywood and Washington. He is the author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (Columbia UP, 2005) and many articles on the Hollywood film industry, on the history of media regulation, and on fair use and academia, among other topics. In 2006, along with two colleagues, he successfully petitioned for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for media professors using clips for teaching. In addition to Penn, Decherney has taught at Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Tsinghua University (Beijing). He is currently working on a new book on the history and future of Hollywood and copyright law.

Jed Esty specializes in twentieth-century British, Irish, and postcolonial literatures, with additional interests in critical theory, history and theory of the novel, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the Victorian novel. After receiving his BA from Yale University and PhD from Duke University, he taught for several years at Harvard University and at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) before joining the Penn faculty. He is the author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton 2004) and coeditor, with Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Antoinette Burton, and Matti Bunzl, of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke 2005). He is currently at work on a book entitled Tropics of Youth: The Bildungsroman and Colonial Modernity. Esty has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the NEH, and the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois; he has published essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Victorian Studies,  (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...)

Amy Kaplan received her Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University, with a specialty in late-nineteenth-century American literature. Working in the interdisciplinary field of American studies, she teaches courses on the culture of imperialism, comparative perspectives on the Americas, and mourning, memory and violence. Her first book, The Social Construction of American Realism, was published by the University of Chicago (1988). She co-edited with Donald Pease, Cultures of U. S. Imperialism (Duke, 1993). Her new book, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, was published by Harvard University Press in 2002. She has received an NEH Fellowship and the Norman Forster prize for the best essay in American Literature in 1998 for "Manifest Domesticity." She has published recent essays on 9/11 and Guantanamo and is currently working on the language and culture of empire today. She has recently published "Imperial Melancholy in America" in  (more...)

Heather Love is Associate Professor of English. Her areas of interest include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, sociology and literature, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007) and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?"). She is currently at work on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman's 1963 book, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity ("The Stigma Archive").

Cary Mazer received his PhD in Theatre from Columbia University. He has published a book on Shakespeare, focusing on production history, and has written articles on Shaw, Ibsen, Granville Barker, and Edwardian Theatre. He regularly teaches courses in theatre history, Shakespeare, and modern drama, and has been involved with a number of Penn theatre productions. For many years he chaired the Theatre Arts Major. He is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and English.

Yolanda Padilla is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.  She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Davis, and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.  Her area of specialization is U. S. Latina/o literature and culture, with additional interests in hemispheric studies, border studies, race and ethnicity in literature, and in questions of literary production and reception.  She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the role of the Mexican Revolution in shaping early Mexican American letters and politics.  The project studies relatively neglected authors such as Ricardo Flores Magon, Josefina Niggli and Luis Perez, and more familiar writers such as Americo Paredes and Jose Antonio Villareal.  She has coedited (with William Orchard) The Plays of Josefina Niggli:  Landmarks of Latino Literature (Wisconsin, 2007).

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.

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...)