George Bahlke (Ph.D., Yale University) teaches 20th century British literature.
Although he is the author of a book on a late-nineteenth-century American novelist, The Novels of Harold Frederic (Cornell, 1969), Professor Briggs's primary scholarly interests are in the intersection of literature and cinema, in Gothic literature, and in modernist literature, especially James Joyce. Recent publications include "Rebecca West vs. James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and William Carlos Williams," in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis (Ohio State, 1996), and "The Full Stop at the End of the 'Ithaca' Chapter of Ulysses," in The Annual of Joyce Studies (University of Texas at Austin, 1996); "Chaplin's Charlie and Joyce's Bloom" has appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature. Professor Briggs's current research concerns connections between Joyce and Dickens and between Joyce and the Soviet film director Sergei Eistenstein.
Professor Ferriss is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, The Misconceiver, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1997. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of periodicals. Her critical study, Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren, published in 1997 by Louisiana State University Press, explores feminist issues in a major twentieth-century author through the lens of narrative theory. Her essay "Andre Dubus's Patriarchal Catholicism" appears in a recent issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly. Other published essays and scholarly interests include the creative process, multicultural and gender perspectives on narrative, and theories of the "resisting reader" in American literature. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Faulkner Society, and been a Fulbright Scholar in Belgium.
On leave 2001-2002
Professor Guttman's book of poems, Reasons for Winter, won the A.M. Klein poetry award in 1992. She received a dissertation fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and grants from the Ministere des affaires culturelles du Quebec and the Canada Council. Her poetry has appeared in The Emily Dickinson Award Anthology of 1998, Riprap: Fiction and Poetry from the Banff Center for the Arts, and Rattapallax. Her areas of academic research are postcolonial literatures, literature and the environment, and contemporary poetry. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems entitled Galactopoiesis.
Root 317; 859-4780; nguttman@hamilton.edu.
Professor Kodat's interest in American literature and culture is marked by a concern with the ways white and black artists have shaped American modernist expression. She holds a joint appointment in the English department and the American Studies program, and her recent interdisciplinary work examines American modern dance and ballet as well as American literature and film. Recent published essays examine the work of William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Allen Tate, Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Steven Spielberg, and Quentin Tarantino. She is currently at work on a book about U.S. modernism and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.
On leave Spring 2002
Professor Larson completed his dissertation on narrative theory and the history of the novel in 1990. He has taught at SUNY/Buffalo, the University of Paris, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Texas at San Antonio. His publications include two novels (The Big Deal and Marginalia), stories in The Iowa Review, Boulevard, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories of 1998, as well as criticism on Herman Melville, Henry James, and popular film. He is currently at work on a novel cycle, a chronicle of four generations of an American family, from 1877 to 2008.
Vincent Odamtten (Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook) teaches African and African-American literature.
Professor Odamtten, who also has taught at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, won the 1976 Valco Fund Literary Award for Poetry. He has given numerous lectures and poetry readings at universities and cultural centers in the United States, Canada, England and Ghana. He has published articles and poetry in the Minnesota Review, Greenfield Review, Mutatu, and Asemka. He has also contributed articles to a number of critical anthologies and other works, including Of Dreams Deferred, Dead Or Alive: African Perspectives on African American Writers, edited by Femi Ojo-Ade (Greenwood Press, 1996) and Language in Exile: Jamaican texts of the 18th and 19th Century, edited by Jean D'Costa and Barbara Lalla (University of Alabama Press, 1990). He is the author of The Art Of Ama Ata Aidoo (University Press of Florida, 1994).
Professor Oerlemans has published articles on the form and function of lyric in Whitman, Milton, and Wordsworth, on literary theory and Henry James, and on animal rights and taxonomy in romanticism. He has completed a book manuscript on "Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature," which examines the many ways in which romantic-period authors explore and represent the physical presence of the natural world. His current research includes a study of the conflict between city and country in the 19th century, particularly of the perceived effects of such landscapes on consciousness.
O'Neill, who has been a member of the Hamilton faculty since 1972, received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota. His research interest is the literature of Restoration England, 1660-1700. He is the author of George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (1984) and has published articles and reviews in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Huntington Library Quarterly, Modern Philology, and the Durham University Journal. Among his recent publications are Samuel Pepys: The War of Will and Pleasure (1995), and Composite Authorship: Katherine Philips and an Antimarital Satire (1993). He is a contributing editor of the Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Drama (2001). O'Neill is an editor of the journal The Scriblerian and a member of the editorial board of the journal Restoration.
Professor O'Neill teaches British literature of the nineteenth century, science and literature, and film studies. She is the author of Robert Browning and Twentieth-Century Criticism (Camden House, 1995). She has published essays on Victorian science and culture and on travel writing. Her recent work is on British novelist and Egyptologist Amelia B. Edwards.
Professor Strout studies the literature of the English Renaissance, in particular the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He has published articles on poems and court masques by Ben Jonson, John Ford's play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and the teaching of expository writing. His most recent work includes an essay on the idea of mutuality in Shakespeare's As You Like It, and he is a contributor to the forthcoming volume on Hamlet in the Modern Language Association's Approaches to Teaching series.
Professor Thickstun researches English and American writers in the 17th century, especially Milton, religious dissenters, and women. She is the author of Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Cornell, 1988). Her recent publications include "Writing the Spirit: Margaret Fell's Feminist Critique of Pauline Theology (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1995) and " 'This was a Woman that taught': Feminist Scriptural Exegesis in the Seventeenth Century" (Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 1991).
Professor Wheatley has received a Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers (University Press of Florida, 2000), and several articles.
All members of the department teach courses outside their specialties, including introductory courses in literature and some courses in expository and creative writing. Individual members of the department also contribute to such interdisciplinary programs as Africana Studies, American Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Women's Studies, and college courses (including a course in film).
