Leadership

Executive Committee Members

Image descriptionCraig Dionne

President - Term Ending: Fall 2012

I teach Shakespeare, English Renaissance Literature, Literary Theory, and Writing about Literature for the undergraduate and graduate Literature programs. Research interests: reception of Shakespeare through the ages, Shakespeare in Popular Culture, theater in early modern urban culture, and history of the discipline. I also edit the department journal, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

Image descriptionCraig N. Owens

Past President - Term Ending: Fall 2012

Craig Owens is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Drake University where he teaches courses in Drama and Irish Literature. Owens earned his Ph.D. at Indiana University, where he specialized in modern drama, Irish studies and literary theory. His dissertation, Mind the Gap, explored the various approaches post-war British playwrights have taken to staging politics. He writes and presents primarily on language and its relationship to staged identity, but also on contemporary television, film and popular culture.

Owens also is an active performer. Most recently, as a founding member of Steinsemble, a performance ensemble devoted to staging modernist drama, he has acted in Gertrude Stein's Counting Her Dresses and Samuel Beckett's Not I. He also has directed a number of plays and writes them as well. His current work includes a series of short satirical plays on modern love and a book-length study of 20th century English and Continental drama titled Absurdisms.

Image descriptionStacey L. Parker Aronson

Committee Member - Term Ending: Fall 2012

Stacey L. Parker Aronson is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Her research covers a wide range of topics in Spanish literature, from the Golden Age to contemporary authors, and she has research interests in feminist studies as well. She has published essays in journals such as Letras Femeninas, Romance Notes, and Ojáncano: Revista de Literatura Española, and her current research explores themes of sexual violence in the Jarchas and “El peligro sexual en los cancioneros”.

Image descriptionSamuel Cohen

Committee Member - Term Ending: Fall 2012

Samuel Cohen, Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Missouri, specializes in Twentieth-Century American literature. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (University of Iowa Press, 2009), 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, third edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), and Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009). He is also Series Editor of a new book series with Iowa, “The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture.”

Image descriptionVéronique Maisier

Committee Member - Term Ending: Fall 2012

Véronique Maisier is Associate Professor of French at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She works in the field of 20th-century and contemporary Francophone literature, and has published extensively on Albert Cohen, Patrick Chamoiseau, among others. She is the author of L’inspiration picaresque dans l’œuvre d’Albert Cohen (Villeneuve d’Ascq : Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2001), and numerous articles in journals such as The French Review, Dalhousie French Studies, Romance Quarterly, and Etudes Francophones. She is currently working on several essays on Albert Cohen, and a book project provisionally entitled Stones and Blood: Violence in Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean Literature.

Image descriptionJohanna Frank

Committee Member - Term Ending: Fall 2013

Johanna Frank is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Windsor, Canada. She is a performance theorist and historian whose research focuses on U.S. drama, theatre, and performance art. Her areas of interest include: performance theory; race, gender, and sexuality in/as performance; intercultural performance; narrative theory and performance; and histories of interdisciplinary performance. She has published essays in journals such as Modern Drama, Journal of Dramatic Literature and Theory, and Biography, and she is the editor of a special issue of Modern Drama on the work of playwright Adrienne Kennedy. She is currently working on a book titled Geographies of Performance: Acts of Writing, Spaces of Play, and the Second World War, which develops strategies for theorizing the relationship between narrative, performance, and theatrical and textual presence. Her recent production credits as a director and dramaturge include Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (University of Louisville), Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (University of Windsor), Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays (University of Windsor), Jane Martin’s Talking With (Windsor Feminist Theatre), Gertrude Stein’s Curtain Raiser and Counting Her Dresses (SteinSemble), Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart (SteinSemble), and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (College of Wooster).

Image descriptionHillary Nunn

Committee Member - Term Ending: Fall 2013

Hillary Nunn teaches courses in Shakespeare and early modern literature. Her current book project focuses on the connections between early modern stagings of revenge tragedies and growing popular interest in anatomical research during the Renaissance. She is also interested in studying the role of Shakespearean works in today's popular culture, whether in films or in everyday speech, and she is currently researching the pedagogical uses of electronic texts in college classrooms.

Image descriptionAndrea Kaston Tange

Committee Member - Term Ending: Fall 2013

Even though Victorian novels get referred to as "big, baggy monsters" because they are long and involve complex plots twists and many, many characters, I love to teach and read them. For me, they offer a glimpse into another world and provide a historical, as well as literary, adventure.

I have long been interested in the intersections of gender, class and identity in the nineteenth century, and my research and teaching reflect a deep commitment to a cultural studies approach to history and literature. My book, Architectural Identities (University of Toronto Press, 2010) examines representations of Victorian domestic life in a range of sources--from fiction to floor plans, autobiography to housekeeping guides. In it, I argue that Victorian middle-class identity was intimately tied to the physical design of homes, and that elements of that design could be manipulated to help redefine one's self. Currently, I am working on two different projects that focus on questions of identity and empire. The first is a collection of primary documents about childhood and empire throughout the century; the second is a book on Victorian travel and Britishness in the age of empire.