2014 Summer Teacher Institutes

Teaching the American Literary Tradition

Our English language arts institute in Austin (June 10–13), titled "Teaching the American Literary Tradition," will follow the eleventh-grade ELA curriculum. Topics to be covered include the literature of slavery and abolition; the literature of the Civil War era; the Harlem Renaissance; American writing during the World Wars; the rhetoric of civil rights; American drama; Texas and Latino literature in the twentieth century; and using American art in teaching language arts.

Interior of dome in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, DC. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Robert S. Levine

A highly regarded leader in American literary studies, Robert S. Levine (keynote speaker) has been an influential force in American and African American literature for thirty years, and more recently has contributed important new work to the study of the literature of the Americas. His scholarly editions of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe have brought their extensive writings to wider audiences. Levine is the general editor of the five-volume Norton Anthology of American Literature. He is professor of English and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he was the founding director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies. Levine received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1981. He received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity won an Outstanding Book Award from Choice magazine in 1997. Levine sits on a number of editorial boards, including American Literary History; Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies; Nathaniel Hawthorne Review; and J19: The Journal for Nineteenth-Century Americanists. In addition to his book on Delany and Douglass, Levine’s work includes more than fifty-five peer-reviewed articles and five edited collections of essays, as well as his 2008 book Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth Century American Literary Nationalism and his 1989 book Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville.

Robert S. Levine.

José F. Aranda Jr.

José F. Aranda Jr. is an associate professor of Chicano/a and American literature. He is the author of When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America (University of Arizona, 2003). He has written articles on early U.S. criticism, nineteenth-century Mexican American literature, the future of Chicano/a Studies, and most recently undertaken an investigation of the relationship between modernity and Mexican American writings, entitled The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1960. Dr. Aranda has a dual appointment in the departments of English and Spanish & Portuguese. He is a board member of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. He is also the founder and director of the Américas Research Center of Rice University, as well as the director of the Latin American studies major at Rice. In 2011, he co-founded Avanzamos: El Taller Chicana/o, an annual workshop focused on advanced scholarship in Chicana/o Studies, sponsored by Rice University and the University of North Texas. He is the current chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

José F. Aranda Jr.

Phillip Barrish

Phillip Barrish received his PhD from Cornell University in 1991. He is currently a professor in the English department at The University of Texas at Austin, where he specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture. He is the author of three books: American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 (Cambridge, 2001), White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism (Ohio State, 2005), and The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge, 2013). He lives in the Travis Heights neighborhood of Austin with his wife and teenage son.

Phillip Barrish.

Jean Cannon

Jean Cannon is literary collections research associate at the Harry Ransom Center, a post she has held since March 2012. Prior to joining the staff of the Ransom Center, Cannon completed a PhD in English at The University of Texas at Austin, where she specialized in the British and American literature of the First World War. She is currently a curator of the Ransom Center gallery exhibition The World at War, 1914–1918.

Jean Cannon.

Evan Carton

Evan Carton holds the Joan Negley Kelleher Centennial Professorship in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin. His principal research areas include nineteenth- and twentieth-century U. S. literature and culture, the history of literary criticism, and literary pedagogy. He is the author of The Rhetoric of American Romance (1985), The Marble Faun: Hawthorne’s Transformations (1992), and Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America (2006); the co-author with Gerald Graff and Robert von Hallberg of The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (1996); and the co-editor with Alan W. Friedman of Situating College English: Contemporary Pedagogies at an American State University (1996). Between 2001–2009, he served as the founding director of UT Austin’s Humanities Institute and is currently a co-principal of the university’s project to redesign its large-section general education literature survey. His current scholarship examines charismatic intellect in American religion, politics, and literature from the 1830s to the present.

Evan Carton.

Steven L. Davis

Steven L. Davis is considered “one of Texas’ leading scholars of its indigenous culture.” He is a curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, which holds the literary papers of the region's leading writers. His books include Texas Literary Outlaws: Six Writers in the Sixties and Beyond, J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind, and Dallas 1963 (co-written with Bill Minutaglio.) His work has appeared in Slate, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, and other publications. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and is currently its vice president. He lives in New Braunfels with his wife and their children, along with some cool dogs and cats.

Steven L. Davis.

Eve Dunbar

Eve Dunbar is an associate professor of English at Vassar College, where she also serves as the associate dean of the faculty. She received her PhD in English from The University of Texas at Austin. Dunbar specializes in African American literature and cultural expression, black feminism, and theories of black diaspora. She is the author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World (Temple University Press 2012), which explores the aesthetic and political ties that bind literary genre, American nationalism, and black cultural nationalism in the literary works of mid-twentieth century African American writers. Dunbar’s publications include an essay in African American Review entitled "Black is a Region: Segregation and Literary Regionalism in Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain (2009). She is also a contributor to the African American National Bibliography (Oxford, 2008) and has written book reviews that have appeared in print and online journals ranging from Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters to Post No Ills: A New American Review...of Reviews. In 2008–09, Dunbar was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship in English by Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Eve Dunbar.

Randall Fuller

Randall Fuller is the Chapman Professor of English at the University of Tulsa and the author of Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists (2007) and From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (2011). For the latter, he received the 2011 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Book Award. His abiding interest is in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. He also specializes in science, the environment, and literature; Native American literature; and intellectual history. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Research Fellow in 2007–2008 and directed the NEH’s Summer Institute for Teachers at Wilson’s Creek Battlefield in 2010. Fuller earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. He recently received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to support research on his current project, an examination of the influence of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on American intellectuals in the nineteenth century.

Randall Fuller.

Stacy Fuller

Stacy Fuller began her tenure at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art as the Henry E. Luce Foundation Works on Paper Intern in June 2003. She later held the positions of the Laura Gilpin Canyon de Chelly Intern and instructional services manager. In September 2007, she was promoted to director of education, where she oversees all educational programs and services. She currently serves as the western region representative of the Museum Education Division Development Committee for the National Art Education Association (NAEA). She holds a B.A. in museum management from Centenary College of Louisiana and an M.A. in art history from Texas Christian University.

Stacy Fuller.

Heather Houser

Heather Houser is an assistant professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. Her fields of research and teaching include contemporary fiction, the environmental humanities, media studies, and science and technology studies. Her publications include a book, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (Columbia, 2014) and articles in essay collections and academic journals such as American Literature, Public Culture, and American Literary History.

Heather Houser.

Coleman Hutchison

Coleman Hutchison is an associate professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, bibliography and textual studies, and poetry and poetics. He is the author of Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America (Georgia, 2012), which offers the first literary history of the Civil War South, and the co-author of Writing About American Literature: A Guide for Students (Norton, 2014). Hutchison’s work has appeared in American Literary History, common-place, Comparative American Studies, CR: The New Centennial Review, Journal of American Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, PMLA, and Southern Spaces, among other venues. His research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Antiquarian Society, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Huntington Library. In 2010 Professor Hutchison received a UT System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.

Coleman Hutchison.

David Kornhaber

David Kornhaber is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at The University of Texas at Austin. His work has appeared in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Research International, and Philosophy and Literature, among other journals. His journalism and theatre criticism have appeared in the New York Times, American Theatre, the Village Voice, and the New York Sun. He recently served as guest editor for a special issue of Modern Drama on the topic of drama and philosophy and has previously served as assistant editor of Theatre Survey. In 2012, he served on the faculty at the Mellon School of Theatre and Performance Research at Harvard University. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Development of the Modern Drama.

David Kornhaber.

Eric Lupfer

Eric Lupfer holds a PhD in English (2003) and an MS in information studies (2004) from The University of Texas at Austin and a BA with High Honors in English from Bowdoin College (1991). Before joining the staff of Humanities Texas in 2004, he worked at UT’s Harry Ransom Center, where he curated an NEH-funded traveling exhibition on Isaac Bashevis Singer and codirected the center’s summer teacher institute. He is a former high school English teacher and has published a number of articles and book reviews on American literature and publishing history, including an essay in the five-volume, collaborative scholarly work, A History of the Book in America. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Eric directs the Humanities Texas grants, education, and awards programs.

Eric Lupfer.

Debra A. Moddelmog

Debra A. Moddelmog is professor of English at The Ohio State University, specializing in twentieth-century American literature and modernism. She is author of Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway and Readers and Mythic Signs: The Oedipus Myth in Twentieth-Century Literature as well as of articles on Hemingway, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Thomas Pynchon. She is also co-editor of Ernest Hemingway in Context, a collection of short essays on different literary, historical, and cultural contexts in which Hemingway’s work can be situated. Most recently, she has been writing on the influence of sexology, one of the “new sciences” of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, on American modernist and Harlem Renaissance writers. She teaches courses on twentieth-century American fiction, modernism, women’s literature, and sexuality and culture.

Debra A. Moddelmog.

Charlotte Nunes

Charlotte Nunes recently completed her PhD in English at The University of Texas at Austin. As a lecturer at UT, she teaches world literature and co-chairs the Rapoport Center Human Rights and Archives Working Group, which brings together people from UT and beyond who are interested in innovative approaches to archives-based research and teaching. She is also the project manager for the Sissy Farenthold Archives Project, a collaboration between the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and the Briscoe Center for American History at UT. She is delighted to participate in this summer's teacher institute by building a digital repository of archival materials that teachers can use in their teaching subsequent to the program.

Charlotte Nunes.

Danielle Brune Sigler

Danielle Brune Sigler is associate director for research and programs at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in American studies from The University of Texas at Austin in 2002 and her master’s of science in information studies in 2009. Her primary areas of research include African American history and American religious history. Before coming to the Ransom Center in 2006, she taught American literature at the University of North Texas and religious studies at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. At the Ransom Center, she has curated the exhibition Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored (2011), co-curated The King James Bible: Its History and Influence (2012), and is currently at work on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2015). Sigler is co-editor of the anthology The New Black Gods (Indiana University Press, 2009), and her work has appeared on the New York Times Disunion blog and in The Daily Beast.

Danielle Brune Sigler.

Jennifer M. Wilks

Jennifer M. Wilks is an associate professor of English and African and African diaspora studies at The University of Texas at Austin, where she is also an affiliate of the program in comparative literature. She is the author of Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West (Louisiana State UP, 2008), which explores the gender dynamics of the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude movements. Her essays have appeared in African-American Review, Callaloo, and Modern Fiction Studies, and, most recently, in the edited collection Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (Minnesota, 2013). Her translation (French to English) of the nineteenth-century French and Swiss diaries of African American activist Mary Church Terrell is in press, and she is currently at work on two book projects: a history of transpositions of the Carmen story set in African diasporic contexts and a study of representations of race and apocalypse in contemporary literature and culture.

Jennifer M. Wilks.