FACULTY RESEARCH
Some faculty members offering courses that may be used towards the British Studies Minor, and their research fields.
Charles Brownell is an authority on the architecture of Thomas Jefferson and B. Henry Latrobe; a scholar of Palladianism; a co-author of the first general history of Virginia architecture, which won multiple awards; and a specialist in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture and decorative arts, particularly the Aesthetic Movement and the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Dr. Brownell takes pride in having shaped the programs in architectural history at VCU, the only American university that holds a yearly architectural history symposium as a showcase for its own graduate students' research. The conference, founded by Dr. Brownell in 1993, is cosponsored by the Virginia Historical Society, the Center for Palladian Studies in America, and a host of other distinguished institutions.
Winnie Chan teaches postcolonial writing and recently completed a manuscript for her second book, Imperial Gastronomy, which examines representations in cosmopolitan Anglophone fiction of foods associated with exotic "others" but in reality distorted, spread, and (in some cases) wholly invented by the British Empire. In their representations of curry, tea, and sugar, for example, writers such as Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and David Dabydeen negotiate their own positions as cosmopolitan "postcolonial" writers, depicting in English experiences that are not English. Winnie is now working on project that traces the use of white narrators in postcolonial fiction -- from the iconically ironic District Commissioner whose misinterpretations end Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, to historiographic metafictions that transcend mimicry by revising and interrogating "the" historical record, to more recent novels that attempt to write into existence a postracial society. Oddly enough, both of these projects derive from her first book, The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals in the 1890s, about short fiction in the marketplace of late-Victorian periodicals, published in 2007.
Leigh Ann Craig studies the history of later medieval Europe, from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. she is currently investigating medieval diagnoses of insanity and demonic possession, and their significance for the history of gender and of disability. Her prior research focused on the participation of women in Christian pilgrimage, both to the shrines of miracle-working saints and to Jerusalem and Rome. She is the author of "Stronger than Men and Braver than Knights: Women and the Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the Later Middle Ages" in the Journal of Medieval History, and "Royalty, Virtue, and Adversity: The Cult of King Henry VI of England" in Albion, both in the summer of 2003, and Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (Brill, 2009); she was also Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage (Brill, 2009).
Joshua Eckhardt focuses his research on the manuscript verse miscellanies (or hand-written poetry anthologies) of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. He's following up his book on such miscellanies, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry (Oxford, 2009), with a scholarly edition of one of them, and a collection of essays on them. He teaches the literature of Renaissance or early modern England and (sometimes) Virginia; Milton; bibliography, book history, and media history.
Nicholas Frankel's research Fields include Victorian poetry, the 1890s, aestheticism and decadence, visual poetics, textual theory, and the history of the book. He is the author of Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books (U. Michigan, 2000) and of Masking The Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s (Rivendale Press, 2009). He has contributed essay-chapters to six book collections and he has published some two dozen essays and reviews to such journals as Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, TEXT, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, Victorians Institute Journal, The Wildean, Romanticism & Victorianism on the Net, and Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide. His edition of Oscar Wilde's The Sphinx, with decorations by Charles Ricketts, will be published by Rice University Press in digital and print form in 2010, followed in 2011 by the first of two print editions of Oscar Wilde's writings for Harvard University Press. Frankel also co-edits Rice University Press's digital series "Literature By Design: British & American Books 1880-1930."
Ibrahim Hamza, Assistant Professor of History.PhD, York University. Ibrahim Hamza's area of study is modern African history with particular reference to political and social developments since 19th century. He has undertaken research and publications on British colonial policies in Northern Nigeria, gender and the administration of justice in Africa and slavery and abolition in Muslim societies. He is currently teaching introductory African history classes and upper classes in history of slavery in Muslim socieites as well as the history of West Africa.
Catherine Ingrassia works on the literature and culture of Restoration and eighteenth-century England. Her research has been focused on the material and symbolic economies that emerged in the early part of the eighteenth century, and their effect on the cultural representations of class and gender. In addition to focusing on canonical male authors of the period (particularly Alexander Pope and Samuel Richardson), she is also particularly interested in women writers of poetry, fiction, and drama. Her publications include Authorship, Commerce, and Gender: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge University Press, 1998; paper 2005); "More Solid Learning": New Approaches to Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, co-editor with Claudia Thomas (Bucknell University Press, 2000); and a modern edition (with appendices and introduction) of Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding's Shamela (Broadview Press, 2004). She was the editor of volumes 33 and 34 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press 2004; 2005)). She is also the co-editor, with Paula R. Backscheider, of The Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture (Blackwell, 2006; paper 2009). Most recently, she edited with Paula Backscheider, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). She is currently working on a book-length project that explores female poets' negotiation of the literary marketplace.
David Latané is currently working on early nineteenth-century Tory journalists and the intersections of culture and politics, with particular focus on William Maginn and the Cork clique. Essays on Maginn and associated figures have recently appeared in Notes & Queries, Victorian Periodicals Review, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Structures of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press). He has published widely on Romantic and Victorian writers, including Browning's Sordello and the Aesthetics of Difficulty (1987). From 1999-2010, Latané was lead editor of Victorians Institute Journal, a scholarly annual. The current volume Victorian Scotland (2009), was preceded by other special topics, including Ghosts of the Victorian (2003), Poetry and the Colonies and Our Imaginary Friends (2007). He also serves as North American editor of Stand, a quarterly literary magazine from Leeds, England.
Sarah Hand Meacham studies colonial American history. Her specialty is women and gender in the colonial South. Her book Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009. Meacham explores in this book how ideas of science, technology, and the American Revolution coalesced in the Chesapeake to shift the production of alcoholic beverages from women's cookery into men's domain in the late eighteenth century. She has published articles on this topic in the Virginia Magazine of Biography and History, Early American Studies, and Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives. Her second project will focus on gender and the invention of the emotion of cheerfulness in the eighteenth-century South. She is researching why the formerly esteemed emotion of melancholy came to be devalued during the eighteenth century and why Americans began to instruct white women that they should always feel "cheerful."
Charlotte Morse, Professor of English. PhD, Stanford University. Charlotte Morse is author of The Pattern of Judgment in the Queste and Cleanness (University of Missouri Press, 1978) and co-editor of The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies : Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen (Medieval Institute, 1992); Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J. A. Burrow (Oxford, 1997); and Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve (Pegasus, 2001). Essays include "Popularizing Chaucer in the Nineteenth Century" (Chaucer Review, 2003) and in festschrifts, "What The Clerk's Tale Suggests about Manly-Rickert's Edition and The Canterbury Tales Project," ""From Ricardian Poetry to Ricardian Studies," "Exemplary Griselda," and "Griselda Reads Philippa de Coucy." She is currently working on nineteenth-century adaptations of the Griselda story and on the role of that story in generating Kittredge's theory of the Marriage Group of Canterbury Tales.
Katherine Saunders Nash, Assistant Professor of English. PhD, University of Virginia.
Katherine Saunders Nash studies narrative theory and gender politics.
She is particularly interested in the ways novels communicate, and
sometimes succeed in changing, historically specific assumptions about
women's minds. She is writing a book on rhetorical strategies, ethics,
and formal innovation in early twentieth-century British novels. Her
work appears in Narrative, The Powys Journal, American Book
Review, Partial Answers, and Style.
Nicholas Sharp, Assistant Professor of English. PhD, Ohio State University. For the last several years, Nicholas Sharp's research Fields
have focused on the form, theory, development, and practice of
sonnets, especially the connections between earlier sonnet practices
(Renaissance and Romantic-Victorian) and later 20th century "sonneteers" such
as John Berryman, Henry Taylor and Marilyn Hacker. He is working on Berryman’s conscious adaptations
from the earliest English sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyattand has published on Henry Taylor’s nostalgic
evocation of Keats’s romantic sonnets in "One Morning
Shoeing Horses" (from his 1985 The Flying Changes).
Sachi Shimomura studies medieval writing. Her publications include Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and "Visualizing Judgment: Illumination in the Old English Christ III" (in Via Crucis: Essays on Early Medieval Sources and Ideas in Memory of J. E. Cross ). Work in progress includes an essay on space and stasis in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and a study of Grendel's glove in Beowulf, both parts of a larger project on medieval spatial and temporal concepts.
Rivka Swenson, Assistant Professor of English. PhD, University of Virginia. Rivka Swenson is completing a book project on identity theory, subject formation, and the aesthetic politics of narrative form titled Producing Origins: The Location of Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Thought and Novels after Unionism. She is editor of Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks (University of Delaware Press, 2008). Essays have appeared in the journals Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture ("Representing Modernity in Jane Barker's Galesia Trilogy: Jacobite Allegory and the Patch-Work Aesthetic," 2005) and Journal of Narrative Theory ("'A Soldier is her Darling Character': Susanna Centlivre, Desire, Difference, and Disguise," 2007). Essays are forthcoming from the journal The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation ("Optics, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Gaze: Looking at Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela," October, 2010) and the Festschrift collection From "Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared": Essays in Honor of Jerry C. Beasley ("Revising the Scottish Plot in Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random," winter 2010)..
Nicholas Wolf, Assistant Professor of History. PhD, University of Wisconsin.
Nicholas Wolf specializes in the history of Britain and Ireland, with a
research focus on the cultural history of the nineteenth century. His articles
and essays on Irish religious history, folklore, and popular culture
have been published by New Hibernia Review, the Journal of British
Studies, and Irish Academic Press. His particular interest lies in the
cultural history of minority languages, a topic at the heart of the book
he is currently completing on language shift in nineteenth-century Ireland and
the relationship between the Irish language and contemporary
transformations in religion, education, and the state.
[Last updated September 2011]
Charles Brownell, Professor of Art History. PhD, Columbia University.
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Winnie Chan, Assistant Professor of English.
PhD, University of Virginia.
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Teaching Interests: postcolonial literature, contemporary British
Leigh Ann Craig, Associate Professor of History. PhD, Ohio State University.
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Joshua Eckhardt, Assistant Professor of English.
PhD, University of Illinois.
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Nicholas Frankel, Associate Professor of English.
PhD, University of Virginia.
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Catherine Ingrassia, Professor of English. PhD, University of Texas.
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David Latané, Professor of English.
PhD, Duke University.
Research Fields: British and Irish periodicals of the 1820s and 1830s; early 19th-century British poetry; contemporary British poetry.
Teaching Interests: British literature and cultural studies, 1750 to the present.
Sarah H. Meacham, Associate Professor of History. PhD, University of Virginia.
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Teaching Interests: medieval literature, Chaucer
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Teaching Interests: British fiction, narrative theory
Catherine Roach holds a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. Her primary research interests are the history of museums and display and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, especially British painting. She is particularly interested in images-within-images, audience reception, and role of visual records in writing histories of display. In 2010, she curated Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. She has contributed articles to the British Art Journal, Visual Culture in Britain, and Museum History Journal, and she is currently at work on a book, Frames of Reference: Paintings-within-Paintings in Britain, 1780-1883.
Research Fields: Renaissance poetry; radio; the sonnet
Teaching Interests: Shakespeare, the sonnet
Sachi Shimomura, Associate Professor of English. PhD, Cornell University.
Research Fields:
Teaching Interests: medieval literature, Chaucer, history of the English language
Research Fields: Restoration and long-18th-century British literature, history, philosophy, culture.
Teaching Interests: Restoration and long-18th-century British and American literature, history, philosophy, culture
Research Fields: History of language, popular culture in the British
Isles
Teaching Interests: Modern Britain, Ireland, and European cultural history