English Faculty Research

English Department faculty are active in a variety of research areas, as described below.

Laurel Bollinger – science fiction

Attitudes toward symbiosis in Science Fiction, particularly SF novels that respond to Lynn Margulis's ideas on mitochondria as formerly free-living cellular organisms, now in symbiotic relationships with nucleated cells.

Holly Flint: Ethnic American Fiction, Especially Ideas of Citizenship

· "J. M. Coetzee's Foe: An Antipastoral Novel for the New South Africa."
· "Cultural Citizenship in the American Empire: Thinking Beyond the Imperial Way of Life in Ethnic American Fiction."
· "On the Off the Rez: Representations of Cultural Citizenship in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues."

Jerry Mebane: Religion, Warfare, and Henry V

In a recently published article, Dr. Mebane argues that the dramatic form and artistic strategies of Shakespeare’s history plays--especially Henry V--undercut the plays’ heroic speeches by emphasizing the fear that all warfare is, from a Christian perspective, evil. He is exploring additional articles and a subsequent book on pacifism and principles of justice in warfare in the Renaissance and in subsequent periods of history. "'Impious War': Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in Henry V," Studies in Philology, 104.2 (Spring 2007): 250-266.

Jeff Nelson

· Translations of some Neo-Latin lullabies by Giovanni Gioviano Pontanto (1429-1503)
· Greed and Justice in Narratives of the Spanish Conquest of the New World

Rose Norman: Technical Writing and American Women's Autobiography

Dr. Norman is collaborating on a book project about the relationship of theoretical and practical issues in technical communication. She also has in preparation several collaborative projects with graduate students, including one on designing electronic portfolios for professional writers, and another on why NSF grants succeed or fail.

Her literary specialty is American women's autobiography, for which she has received several grants to travel to special collections. Her current research focuses on autobiographies of contemporary Southern women writers.

Eric Smith, Postmodern and Postcolonial Studies

Dr. Smith’s most recent publications include the following:

“‘The Only Way Out is Through’: Space, Narrative, and Utopia in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture (forthcoming)

“‘Ambiguity at its Best’: Historicizing G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature (forthcoming)

“Robert Antoni.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Literature. Ed. John Clement Ball (forthcoming)

“‘Caught Straddling a Border’: A Novelistic Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 37 (2007): 447-72.

“A Voyage to Future Pasts: The Vengeance of Other Time in Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance.” Critique 48 (2006): 58-70.

Rev. of Twenty-First Joyce, eds. Ellen Carol Jones and Morris Beja. South Atlantic Review 71 (2006): 173-76.

“The Ghost Machine: Spiritualism, Anachronism, and Alterior Acoustics in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana.” The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 12 (2005): 84-99.
“Robert Antoni” Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics. Ed. M. Keith Booker et.al. Greenwood, 2005.

Current works in progress:

“‘A Presage of Horror’: Cacotopia, the Paris Commune, and Stoker’s Dracula”

“New Maps of Hope: Postcolonial Science Fictions”
A book project examining the recent formal convergence of the postcolonial novel and narrative SF.