For advisors and Students: English writing program courses for Spring 2017.
All of the courses below focus on working intensively on student writing at levels appropriate for – and
challenging to - students’ current academic writing proficiency. But each of them is taught with different
themes and texts, by professors with different intellectual styles and interests. In order that students can
choose the course which will be most inspiring and valuable to them, we offer here a little bit of information
– first about the course contents, and then about the Professors.
If you have any questions, do get in touch with Geoff Gilbert, the chair of the department of Comparative
Literature and English ([email protected]), or with Cary Hollinshead-Strick, who runs the writing program
([email protected]).
These courses help to satisfy the General Education writing requirement. Students looking to develop their
writing in other ways might consider our creative writing courses (also coded EN) or courses in literature
(coded CL)
•
EN1000A
Professor: Mark Ennis
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 09:00-10:20, in G113
Principles of Academic Writing: New York, New York
In this course you will develop and sharpen your formal academic writing skills through close
reading, discussion, and reflective writing on works by American authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Jay McInerney, Paul Auster, and Siri Hustvedt, all set in “the city that never sleeps,” centering on
questions related to the search for and construction of identity. Working with more informal
interactive modes of written expression through a variety of activities and projects based on current
news items, film excerpts, and video documents, you will reflect on life in the city and the writing
process itself.
EN1000B
Professor: Ann Mott
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 10:35-11:55, in G113
Principles of Academic Writing: The Authentic Self
This above all: To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Polonius, giving advice to his son, Laertes. Shakespeare, Hamlet (I, 3)
Literature is strewn with messages about people who play you (and frequently themselves) false,
and the fiction we will read, discuss and write about this semester is no exception. All of the intrigue
in our works stems from characters who act as someone they are not, and in nearly every case, the
results are disastrous. Each protagonist has been ‘trained’ at early ages: some strive to be the best in
their contemporary societies and fear being seen as a failure; others are blocked from personal
growth by societal, cultural, gender and economic limitations. Each work highlights characters who
are forced to wear masks but who try to shed their previous artificial self to assume some newer
authentic self, for better or worse. The primary goal of this course is to offer intensive practice in
writing and reading. We will conduct this class as a seminar: you will be encouraged to read
constantly, write critically, collaborate energetically and function as participants in a lively intellectual
community. Readings include: Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”; Ibsen, A
Doll’s House; Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar named Desire; Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley; James,
The Aspern Papers, and Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl.
EN1000C
Professor: Ann Mott
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 12:10-13:30, in G113
Principles of Academic Writing: The Authentic Self
Description: see EN1000B
EN 1010A
Professor: Roy Rosenstein
Tuesday and Friday, 16:55-18:15, in G102
College Writing: Confronting Life and Art
How do we integrate the often contradictory worlds of life experience and creative imagination? This
semester we will read modern American and British authors (McCullers, Wilde) as well as continental
texts about earlier periods (nineteenth-century Italy, Renaissance Spain, Classical Greece). All these
writers and works address the universal quest for a sense of well-being and fulfillment, both in
society and in art. For some, like McCullers, personal realization and interpersonal harmony
constitute a science to be learned slowly and painfully. For others, like Wilde, pleasure is a function
of art, not life, unless the latter imitates and outdoes the former. In Rojas, literature seems to mirror
only a flawed reality. Can our world be rewritten instead to reflect the triumphant idealism of art, as
in Longus? Lampedusa questions whether we should expect to find fulfillment in love, work, family,
religion, or politics. Is individual satisfaction a utopian dream ultimately to be sought and perhaps
achieved through art alone, as his Prince suggests? In sum, if the pursuit of happiness is an
inalienable right, how may this common goal best be served, through art or life or both? Readings
include Carson McCullers, from The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories; Wilde, The Importance of Being
Earnest; Lampedusa, The Leopard; Fernando de Rojas, Celestina; Longus, Daphnis and Chloe; and a
selection of Romantic poetry.
EN1010B
Professor: Adrian Harding
Tuesday and Friday, 12:10-13:30, in SD-02
College Writing: The Writer’s World
When we read, we often have the impression of entering a different world, of travelling in an unknown
country where some things are familiar, others strange and new, some riddled with conflicting desires,
others defined by unmoving law. In its own way each new work is a Genesis of reality, a Creation of
the world. Within this ‘world’, notions of what we can relate to and what we cannot are at the heart of
our experience of reading, as of our experience of life. The texts on our course range from
representations of the ‘normal’ to representations of the perverse, sometimes inverted one in the guise
of the other. We shall analyse different literary 'worlds' from different cultural and historical worlds, so
that we can develop a critical approach to diverse texts, respecting their specificity and trying to define
what is common among them. Historically we move from one of the most powerful theatrical
representations of human frailty, Shakespeare’s King Lear, staging itself as a disturbing dislocation of
the world and the mind, of the very idea of “nature”, to Xavier de Maistre’s playfully profound
conversation with himself, Voyage Around My Room (1794), announcing the inwardness and ironic
solitude of nineteenth century Romanticism. We enter the surreal, grotesque and poignant world of
Russia’s encounter with modernity, in Nikolai Gogol’s Stories from the 1830s, and in Gogol’s best
interpreter, Nabokov, staging the hilarious and pitiful exploits of a Russian professor in American exile
in his short comic masterpiece Pnin (1957). We end with three very different explorations of life in the
twentieth century: the Iranian surrealist Sadegh Hedayat’s ironic, lyrical tales Three Drops of Blood,
bringing to mind a kind of Persian Kafka; the limpid, haunting subtleties found in the brief, inimitable
Palm of the Hand Stories of the great Japanese writer Kawabata; and the deceptively casual freedoms of
the American poet Frank O’Hara, in his Selected Poems, some of the freshest and most liberating writing
we can hope to encounter.
EN1010C
Professor: TBD
Monday and Thursday, 15:20-16:40, in SD-01
College Writing: [Description to follow]
EN1010D
Professor: Elizabeth Kinne
Monday and Thursday, 09:00-10:20, in SD-05
College Writing: Medievalisms – Arthuriana
This writing course will explore one of the most important literary traditions to be created during the
Middle Ages, the Arthurian legend. The much loved King Arthur, his unfaithful queen Guinevere, his
errant knights and the federating Round Table are a place of continuous revisitation, the inspiration
behind contemporary texts and older retellings of the legend. You will read and write about some of
the Classical texts that informed the legend, Sir Thomas Mallory’s Morte Darthur that compiled much
of the legend as it is now known, and subsequent retellings of the tale. This course will serve as an
introduction to a cultural and literary tradition all too often overlooked today, but that persists in pop
culture, cinema, fantasy and science fiction often unbeknownst to readers and spectators.
EN1010E
Professor: Sneharika Roy
Tuesday and Friday, 09:00-10:20, in G102
College Writing: “Hell”
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani described New York City after the Twin Towers attack as “Hell, what
Dante must have meant when he described Hell.” Whether we believe in hell or not, when we are
confronted with horror of magnitude that cannot be directly expressed, we turn to the analogy of
hell. The focus of this course will therefore be on the representation of hell not simply as a “place,”
but as one of most profound and powerful metaphors of human civilisation. Surprisingly, political
history will be at the heart of our explorations as we examine the medieval power struggle between
the Church and the Italian city-states in Dante’s Inferno and the tussle between monarchical and
republican ideologies in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Melville’s Moby Dick. Indian and existential
philosophy will inform our discussions of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential hell in “No Exit” and Mulk
Raj Anand’s depiction of Indian soldiers fighting during World War One in Across the Black Water.
This course is therefore situated at the crossroads of philosophy, politics, comparative religion, and
literature. In this sense, hell is much more than a creepy hall of horrors—it is a fundamental part of
our religious, philosophical, cultural, and human heritage.
EN1010F
Professor: Russell Williams
Tuesday and Friday, 13:45-15:05, in SD-02
College Writing: Intoxication
Throughout literary history, writers have consistently been drawn to intoxication. They have used
their work to ponder the temptation of intoxicants, and the altered states of perception they can
produce. Writers have also regularly intoxicated themselves to aid the creative process, or to escape
the pressure of artistic creation and the monotony of humdrum reality. The intoxicant of choice can
take many forms. It can be legal highs: cigarettes, strong coffee and alcohol favoured by the caféfrequenting auteur. It can also be drugs (both prescribed and otherwise). Intoxication does not
necessarily require substances: adherents report that asceticism and religious fanaticism can create
equivalent states. The act of writing itself has also been posited as exhilarating or intoxicating. In
turn, the process of reading has been celebrated for its capacity to produce a similar effect. This
course, through close examination of a series of texts from classical antiquity to the present day, will
consider how writers have interrogated various ideas of intoxication and explore the relationship
between this topic and writing. It will consider the work of writers including Euripides, Zola,
Rimbaud and Martin Amis. The study of intoxication as a theme will help students improve their
academic writing skills. This will be achieved through a close critical study of the set texts and require
students to be practically engaged in class discussions and presentations as well as conducting
independent reading and research, and writing assessed essays.
EN1010G
Professor: William Dow
Monday and Thursday, 09:00-10:20, in SD-02
College Writing: The Perils of Power
This course explores ideas about the perils and problems of power in a range of texts from
Renaissance England to Depression-era America. It approaches power from the context of those
who are traditionally empowered and those who must learn power. Through the perspectives of
those who experience power’s effects and inequities most acutely, we will consider such questions as:
What is power? Where does it originate? How does it differ from “authority,” “right,” and
“sovereignty”? What are its effects on race, gender, and class? As we deal with such questions, we will
be seeking both perennial and carefully historicized answers to the problems power raises.
EN 2020A
Professor: Roy Rosenstein
Tuesday and Friday, 15:20-16:40, in G102
Writing and Criticism: Confinement and Flight
This section of Writing and Criticism proposes extensive readings and intensive analyses in
representative monuments of our Western literary heritage, from Classical Greece to modern North
and South America, around the broad theme of confinement and flight. Our readings will invite us
to examine ways in which authors’ perceptions of external and internal limitations have influenced
their presentations of the human condition: fate (moira) in Homer and Sophocles, the body in Plato
and Apuleius, societal roles and moral standards in Lazarillo de Tormes and Shakespeare, family
conflict and prejudice in Faulkner, and ultimately the nature of narrative and the world at large in
Borges. In our discussions we will chart the encounter between the dread of constraint and the
drama of freedom. Class each week addresses universal themes, such as the growth of the individual,
the heroic ideal, the development of myth, the writing of history, man and woman in society, and the
conflict of love and honor. Readings include: Homer, The Iliad; Sophocles, Oedipus the King;
Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo; Apuleius, The Golden Ass; Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes;
Shakespeare, Richard II; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; and Borges, Labyrinths.
EN2020B
Professor: Sneharika Roy
Tuesday and Friday, 13:45-15:05, in A2
Writing and Criticism: Economics and Business in Literature
This course offers students the opportunity to visit—or revisit—economic history and theories
through literature. We will explore economic phenomena such as: gift-giving and commodityexchange during the Islamic Renaissance (“Sindbad the Sailor”), the history of loans in Renaissance
Europe (The Merchant of Venice), advertising (“Goblin Market”), the rise of colonialism and
mercantilism (Robinson Crusoe, River of Smoke which chronicles the Opium Wars), and the evolution of
modern salesmanship in the US (Death of a Salesman). Each “case-study” will allow us to better
understand the interaction between individuals and the specific business practices of their societies as
represented in literary texts. This transcultural and transhistorical approach thus involves, for
example: comparing the economic injunctions of the Bible and the Quran, counterpointing the views
of Aristotle and Karl Marx on usury, and exploring the political distortion of Adam Smith’s ideas to
justify monopoly, imperialism, and war. We will also grapple with the abstractions of economic
theory and the generalisations of “business mantras” when put to the test of the messy financial,
moral, and psychological complexities of human existence.
EN 2020C
Professor: Dan Gunn
Monday and Thursday, 12:10-13:30, in SD-02
Writing and Criticism: Children and Adults
This writing and criticism course will look at various ways in which children and their parents have
interacted through the ages. Why is childhood so important to writers, and has this importance
changed over the centuries or remained constant? Certain works will focus on a child’s view of the
universe, others on adults’ feelings in relation to both their childhood and their own children.
Children will be seen as engendering both love and hate in parents. In turn, parents will be seen as
longing for their childhood, either as a place of innocence or as a time of freedom. A series of
important texts, from antiquity to the present, will highlight these and other themes. Readings
include: Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Georges Perec, W or The Memory of Childhood;
William Wordsworth, Selected Poems; William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; Sophocles, Oedipus the King;
and Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
EN2020D
Professor: David Tresilian
Tuesday and Friday, 09:00-10:20, in SD-02
Writing and Criticism: Ideas of the Other
This course looks at ideas of self and other as these are expressed in selected literary texts. It starts
with ideas of otherness, sexual and cultural, as expressed in a major work of ancient Greek tragedy,
Euripides’s Medea, before moving on to the representation of cultural and racial otherness in
Shakespeare’s Othello, one of the English Renaissance dramatist’s four major tragedies. The course
examines how the other or outsider can be seen as at once seductive and disruptive, forcing a
reconsideration of hierarchies of sex and power. Longer prose works read in the course, Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe and Stoker’s Dracula, examine the possibilities and anxieties associated with the
opening up of the wider world. While Defoe is writing during the heroic phase of early capitalist
expansion, his lonely protagonist exploiting and reordering the non-European world, Stoker’s
popular horror novel dramatizes late-Victorian anxieties of invasion in lurid and melodramatic terms.
Freud’s ‘Fragment of a Study of Hysteria,’ his case of Dora, probes otherness within, raising the
possibility that all of us, for the psychoanalyst, are ultimately strangers to ourselves. Finally, Tayeb
Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, an Arab rewriting of themes from Othello, reverses the gaze of
Shakespeare’s play in a twentieth-century tale of otherness at home and abroad
EN2020E
Professor: Russell Williams
Tuesday and Friday, 09:00-10:20, in G113
Writing and Criticism: The Pleasures of Crime
Throughout literary history, writers, readers and audiences have been fascinated by transgressions,
misdeeds and criminal acts. These range from the atrocities evoked in the plays of antiquity to the
serial murders familiar to fans of contemporary TV series. Murder and other serious crimes can bring
about a vicarious and frequently visceral thrill in the viewer or reader, as he or she enjoys reading
such evocations from a safe distance. Descriptions of crime can also bring reassurance as the criminal
is tracked, caught, and held to account for their crime. Writing about crime can be particularly
revealing from a social perspective and frequently forces the reader to reconsider their
preconceptions about crime, behaviour and societal acceptability. This course, centred on close
critical readings of primary and secondary texts, will encourage students to question the appeal of
both early writing about crime and the genre that has subsequently come to be known as ‘crime
fiction’. In particular, it will consider how the nineteenth century was a turning point for crime fiction
with the emergence of the figure of the detective, and consider how the genre can be read as a
realisation of a human desire for close inquiry and discovery, or what Carlo Ginzburg, expressed as
the ‘evidential paradigm’. The course will also ask if there is a relationship between such a paradigm
and critical study: is the close reader also a detective? The primary source texts to be considered span
from the classical period to the present day. They will include: Oedipus The King by Sophocles; Hamlet
by William Shakespeare; a selection of stories by Edgar Allen Poe, a novel by Raymond Chandler,
and some contemporary French detective writing in English translation. We will also examine Arthur
Conan Doyle’s ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and consider its television adaptation as part of the BBC TV series
Sherlock. Students are encouraged to foster their own interests in independently reading crime fiction
as part of the course.
EN2020F
Professor: Russell Williams
Tuesday and Friday, 10:35-11:55, in SD-04
Writing and Criticism: The Pleasures of Crime
Description: see EN2020E
EN2020G
Professor: Brenton Hobart
Monday and Thursday, 10:35-11:55, in SD-01
Writing and Criticism: The Uncanny
Beginning in Antiquity, we intend to explore the eternal concept of the uncanny (strangeness,
discomfort, unnatural, supernatural) through works of literature. How does the imagination create,
recreate, intensify, exaggerate and undo what it might consider unordinary, far from home – or unhomely – or, rather, uncanny? Emphasis will be placed on ways in which this concept extends
throughout various literary genres including Antique poetry, Renaissance tragedy, philosophical
discourse in the Age of Enlightenment, the detective novel, the fantastique, and science fiction. Some
emphasis will also be placed on portrayals of the uncanny in the fine arts throughout the centuries
and in film.
EN2020H
Professor: Brenton Hobart
Monday and Thursday, 13:45-15:05, in SD-02
Writing and Criticism: The Uncanny
Description: see EN2020G
EN2020I
Professor: David Tresilian
Tuesday and Friday, 12:10-13:30, in G207
Writing and Criticism: Stories of the Self
‘What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and moving
how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension how like a god.’ Hamlet’s
famous words from Shakespeare’s play express early modern optimism about human possibilities,
ironically placing them in the mouth of one of the English dramatist’s most self-conflicted
protagonists. This course will look at Hamlet and a range of other works with Hamlet’s selfquestioning in mind. Who am I? What am I? What kinds of relationship do I have with others? Even
with myself? It starts with Sophocles’s Antigone, a major work of ancient Greek tragedy having much
to say about the social and moral bonds that constitute the self. Hamlet introduces the great liberal
theme of self and society, separating private conscience from public roles and looking at the range of
selves routinely presented to others. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written against the background of
the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the growth of the factory system, poses the question of
human possibilities anew, this time in terms of a scientific experiment outside moral bounds. Major
works from European modernism – Freud’s ‘Fragment of a Study of Hysteria,’ Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – present new ways of writing about the self,
whether in terms of psychoanalysis, ‘stream of consciousness’, or against the background of
breakneck political and social change.
EN2020J
Professor: Geoff Gilbert
Monday and Thursday, 16:55-18:15, in SD-03
Writing and Criticism: Writing Matter, Reading Matter
The Writing and Criticism courses aim to refine the skills of critical reading and academic writing
through a series of written exercises, and the careful consideration of a range of literary and other
texts from the ancient world to the present day. This section, entitled “Reading Matter, Writing
Matter”, offers a genealogy for thinking a crucial question of our time, namely the question of
materialism. Some commentators, since the 1980s, have stressed the de-materialisation of our age.
We have, in this account, become virtual: and our bodies, our pleasures, our thoughts, and our
economies depend less than even before on the matter of the world. This kind of thought has started
to look increasingly limited recently, and it is clear that we need to find new ways of conceiving and
imagining the distribution and social reality of the stuff of the world, the matter in which and by
which we live. This course will explore some elements of this idea, and look to the resources of
literature for ways of thinking freshly about matter. We start with Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean
thinker. His long poem on “The Nature of Things” links sensual experience to an atomic theory of
matter and an account of the cosmos; we shall look to two great twentieth-century novelists –
Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison – to consider how desire and memory might inform, and be
informed by, the way we think of the material world. German playwright Bertolt Brecht opens
questions about the politics of theories of matter that are deeply relevant to contemporary political
and ecological debates.
.
EN2020K
Professor: Cary Hollinshead-Strick
Monday and Thursday, 09:00-10:20, in PL-03
Writing and Criticism: Networks of Transmission
The movement of people and of information is historically linked with markets as meeting places and
as networks for media transmission. Books that explicitly or implicitly take into account their own
circulation are often engaging with their place in an economy. This course will explore a range of
literary anxieties about and hopes for textual transmission of messages. Written language, be it spells
or translations, legal documents, or clichéd speech, reflects on its own purpose in the works we will
be reading. By monitoring the motives for and the consequences of those reflections, we will
consider how books have been engaging with questions of their own physical existence and
circulation since well before their electronic transmission became a possibility. Readings will include:
Homer, The Odyssey, Shakespeare, The Tempest, Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”, and Flaubert,
Madame Bovary
A little information about the professors:
Bill Dow is Professor of American Literature at the Université Paris-Est (UPEM) and Professor of English at
The American University of Paris. He is an Associate Editor of Literary Journalism Studies (Northwestern
University Press) and has published articles in such journals as Publications of the Modern Language Association,
The Emily Dickinson Journal, Twentieth-Century Literature, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Critique, The
Hemingway Review, MELUS, Revue Française D'Etudes Américaines, Actes Sud, Prose Studies, and Etudes Anglaises.
He is the author of the book, Narrating Class in American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), co-editor of
Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Richard Wright in a Post-Racial
Imaginary (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is currently completing a book-length study on American Modernism and
radicalism entitled Reinventing Persuasion: Literary Journalism and the American Radical Tradition, 1900-2000.
Mark Ennis teaches American literature-based writing courses focusing on questions of identity as a
construct, speech communication classes at AUP and at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science de
l'Information et de la Communication (CELSA), the graduate school of communications of the Sorbonne,
and works as a freelance translator. He has published and given numerous workshops on the use of television
as a didactic tool for the development of communication skills.
Geoff Gilbert is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and English. He has taught at AUP
since 1999; before then he taught at the University of Cambridge in England, where he completed his
doctorate. His first book was on early twentieth century experimental writing and culture; he is currently
working on a book on very contemporary ‘realist’ writing, economics, and the experience of globalisation. He
is interested in Marxism, in questions of sexuality, in contemporary poetry as well as fiction, in Scots
literature, and in translation (as theory, and in practice). He also writes poetry.
Dan Gunn has research interests principally in twentieth-century European literature, fiction especially, and
has specialized in the work of Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett. He regularly reviews works of fiction and
texts on literary theory for the TLS. He writes and publishes fiction – his most recent novel is The Emperor of
Ice Cream (Seagull, 2014) – and is particularly interested in the area between fiction and non-fiction. Because of
his activity in this field, he occasionally supervises student theses in creative writing. He is the Paris director
of the correspondence of Samuel Beckett, an international project based in Emory University, whose aim is
the publication of a selection of Beckett’s voluminous correspondence. The fourth volume was published this
year. Since January 2007 he has been director of the Center for Writers & Translators at AUP, and he is
editor of the Cahiers Series for which he also translates texts.
Adrian Harding did his doctoral research on the development of modernist poetry, focusing on the relations
of epic and hermetic writing across the European and American avant-gardes. This has extended backwards
into European romanticisms and laterally into various poetics of the visual arts and of narrative realism,
centring on the relations of performance and reference, the aesthetic and the ethical, touching on older
questions of music and meaning. He has written and taught on European romanticisms, modern British
literature, modern American poetry and poetics, contemporary theatre, contemporary French fiction, and
literature and the visual arts. He has also lectured and written on contemporary art and contemporary poetry,
having many moons ago set up an international contemporary art gallery and performance space in
Edinburgh. He writes and researches in the areas of poetry and poetics, narrative and performance, both
anglophone and European. His work has recently focused on practices of embodiment and dislocation in late
nineteenth-century realism, on the relations between the semantics of prosody and the cultural and social
limits of a 'poetics of the real', centering on the writings of Henry James. He co-founded the European
Society for Jamesian Studies and is a member of the British Academy research group for the study of literary
reception. He also has an interest in literary translation, which he has long practised and taught. He has
published poetry and is occupied with (by?) a novel.
Brenton Hobart is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, English and French at AUP. After
completing full undergraduate and graduate curricula in both the United States and France, he received the
degrees of PhD from Harvard University (2012) and Doctorate from the University of Paris-Sorbonne
(2014). His thesis—which he is currently revising for publication—is a study of the literary representations of
epidemics known as the plague in French Renaissance literature. He likes making sandcastles on the beaches
of Nice and frequenting Canadian restaurants, all over the world.
Cary Hollinshead‐Strick’s teaching and research focus on the history of material texts and on the literary
and political resonances of popular culture. She is interested in how technology and the artistic imagination
have co-evolved, and usually finds ways to bring the press or its earlier equivalents into discussions of books
and plays.
Elizabeth Kinne. Professor Kinne has been living, studying, and teaching in France for over twelve years,
her undergraduate and graduate work including many transatlantic journeys. Having focused on romance
languages as an undergraduate, she specialized in French and English medieval literature in graduate school
and received a dual PhD in French and Women’s Studies from The Pennsylvania State University in Spring
2013. Her dissertation, “Persuading the Polity: Authority, Marriage, and Politics in Late-Medieval France”
studies the interrelatedness of gender and politics in conduct literature for women during the Hundred Years’
War. She has been at AUP since 2010 where her writing and literature courses often discuss gender, sexuality,
and the construction of knowledge. She has taught French language and literature in the United States and
English language and literature at several French institutions. Her medieval research interests include the Old
French fabliaux, Arthurian literature, conduct literature and women’s writing. As a gender scholar, she
explores questions concerning women in the military. She also provides translating, interpreting, research, and
consulting services for French government agencies.
Ann Mott has taught a variety of composition and literature classes in the undergraduate English and
freshmen FirstBridge and EnglishBridge programs. Director of the University’s Writing Lab and a member of
the Executive Board of the EWCA (European Writing Centers Association), Mott is active in cultivating links
among Writing Center practitioners across Europe and beyond and in creating a forum for bridging
international models of Writing Center theory. She has helped organize EWCA conferences in Turkey,
Greece, Germany, and Bulgaria, and hosted the 7th EWCA conference at AUP in 2010. Mott presents
professional papers annually on both local and global visions of Writing Center practice. Her research
interests include composition theory, particularly process pedagogy.
Roy Rosenstein. A New Yorker by birth, Professor Rosenstein also holds British and Lithuanian passports.
He took his degrees on both sides of the Atlantic: Sorbonne (licence, maîtrise), Harvard (MA), Columbia
(PhD). He has also taught on the East and West Coasts, in Greece, in Brazil, and at the Sorbonne. In earlier
years he worked as escort interpreter for the U.S. Department of State. The French government recently
named him Chevalier des arts et des lettres. As a comparatist, his research focuses principally on the Romance
languages. His publications attest wider interests, developed in the AUP classroom teaching all periods from
antiquity to contemporary. He has published on the classical tradition, on medieval and Renaissance authors,
but also on modern literatures, including English and American. He has written about gays, Jews, and
Muslims in medieval literature; Arabic ties to Western texts; Russian and German models for Japanese fiction;
foreign wars in American literature; medieval to modern women’s writing from the U.S., France, Brazil, and
elsewhere.
Sneharika Roy. Professor Roy studied English, French, and Indian literature at the University of Mumbai
before pursuing a Ph.D. at La Sorbonne Nouvelle. During her doctorate, she taught courses in Postcolonial
Studies and Literature as well as history and civilisation courses in French universities and grandes écoles. She
joined the American University in 2014 where she teaches English and Comparative Literature courses, often
drawing from her research in classical and contemporary trends in epic. Her thesis, “The Migrating Epic
Muse,” focuses on the epic narratives of Herman Melville, Derek Walcott, and Amitav Ghosh as syncretic
fusions of European literary traditions and epic practices rooted in the authors’ native contexts. Such postclassical, transnational avatars of epic require equally hybrid theoretical frameworks bridging classical and
postcolonial paradigms, an issue she continues to explore in articles published in Commonwealth Essays and
Studies and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. In 2014, she co-edited the Spring volume of the Paris-based peerreview journal Commonwealth Essays and Studies. She is currently working on varied projects, notably a chapter
for a volume on Amitav Ghosh in the MLA series “Approaches to Teaching World Literature.” She has also
expanded her research interests to explore the dynamics of epic in classical Sanskrit and Latin literature as
well as the rise of the “business epic” in contemporary literature.
David Tresilian’s academic background is in modern English and Comparative Literature. More recently he
has moved into the study of the modern and contemporary literature of the Arab world. He has published
widely on modern Arabic literature in English and Spanish. His 'A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic
Literature' appeared in 2008, as did his translation of 'Conscience of a Nation: Writers and Society in Modern
Egypt,’ a standard work on particularly the literature of modern Egypt. His ‘A Brief Introduction’ is now
routinely assigned in introductory courses on the literature of the modern Arab world. He is also a writer,
editor and translator. He has worked as a consultant in cultural development, notably for UNESCO in
Central and Southwest Asia, and he published a book on poverty alleviation and community based
development with UNESCO in 2005. Most recently, he has worked on projects in Southeast Asia, the
People’s Democratic Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China, as well as on private-sector
projects in Southeast Asia where he was based in Singapore. His journalism regularly appears in ‘Al-Ahram
Weekly’, published in Cairo, as well as in the ‘Arab Weekly’ in London, and he has commented on Middle
East affairs for media outlets in Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. Current projects include a study
of modern Arabic literary translation and a similar work to his ‘Brief Introduction’, this time focusing on the
literature of the Arab Maghreb.
Russell Williams came to AUP after completing his doctoral studies and teaching for four years at the
Université Paris-Est. His research focusses on the novel and his PhD thesis explored the style, poetics and
narrative technique of the French writer Michel Houellebecq. In addition to his ongoing work on
Houellebecq, Russell Williams’ research concerns modern and contemporary American literature, the cultural
resonances between French and English language writing, and European detective fiction, particularly the
work of néo-polar writers Thierry Jonquet and Jean-Patrick Manchette. He has also published on the
relationship between writing and notions of extremity and writing and intoxication. In addition to fiction,
Professor Williams is interested in contemporary cinema and visual art as well as experimental music and
noise. His journalism and literary criticism regularly appears in publications including the Times Literary
Supplement, the New Statesman, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Quietus. He also writes for his website,
www.urbanlandfill.co.uk. He tweets at @russwilliams_uk