Professor Dimino offers a wide variety of courses on American literature and on women writers. Her interests include African American literature, the city in American literature and film, intertextuality, the portrayal of motherhood in literature and American humor.
M.A., C.Phil., Ph.D., UCLA
Professor Myhill offers courses and tutorials in Medieval and Renaissance British Literature. She also teaches drama and dramatic theory in all periods and is involved in the theater program. Her research focuses on theories of audience and genre in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama.
M.A., Ph.D. 1993, University of California, Santa Cruz
Professor Wallace teaches a wide range of English-language literature with a focus on British fiction and literary theory. She has a particular interest in feminist and gender theories and related theoretical fields, and is a founding member of the Gender Studies faculty. She has written on topics ranging from aesthetics and politics in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to figurative aspects of British law in the 1794 London treason trial of the novelist Thomas Holcroft. Her scholarship focuses on eighteenth century and Romantic-era fiction, culture, and politics.
Her book, Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel, 1790-1805, examined the evolving citizen-subject in late century reform fiction (Bucknell 2009), and was supported by an NEH College Teacher Fellowship. She also published an edition of two period novels for college teaching—Mary Hays’s 1796 Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Amelia Alderson Opie’s 1804 Adeline Mowbray. Recently she was awarded a Lewis Walpole Library Fellowship for her project on “Illustrating Speech: Depicting Professional, Popular, and Illicit Speaking.” Professor Wallace is currently writing another book on public political and legal speech and its representations in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain.
Ph.D., University of New York at Buffalo
I work in poetics, meaning that I am interested in the history and theory of poetry. This is a field as old as Western culture itself, but I spend most of my time on American poetry written during the period from the end of the nineteenth-century to the present day. As I read, study, and teach poetry, I am constantly interested in the unexpectedly vexing question of what, exactly, it is—I mean, if you were to stumble upon a sheet of paper with some words on it, how would you tell whether or not it is a poem? One test: if you can identify with the workings of the words in a way very similar to how you might identify with the development of a song, then it’s pretty likely that those marks on the page are the words of a poem. In fact, I often tell my students that reading a poem is more like listening to music than it is like reading a novel. Just what I mean by that is a touchstone of nearly everything I teach and write.
My current research explores the relationship between innovative literary practice and music in post-World War II American poetry. Most of this work finds its way into my book project, Orphic Bend: Music and Innovative Writing, which treats a wide range of writers, including Charles Bernstein, Jayne Cortez, Robert Creeley, Nathaniel Mackey and John Taggart. Exploring the relationship between poetry and music in avant-garde opera, jazz aesthetics, performance poetry, postmodern pastoralism and the elegy, the book identifies an exciting strain in contemporary innovative writing that participates in ancient debates over what music is, where it comes from, and what it does.