Faculty

Chair, American Studies
Downey House 303

Professor of English
Downey House 303
860-685-3603

Olin Professor of English
860-685-3603

Professor, American Studies
Downey House 303
860-685-3603

jpfister@wesleyan.edu

BA Columbia University
MA University of London
MA University of Sussex
PHD Yale University

AMST204 - 01
Junior Coll Cul Pwr & Amer St

ENGL175 - 01
Staging America

ENGL204 - 01
American Literature, 1865-1945

Office Hours:

Spring '13: Monday 2:00-4:00 PM

Research Interests:

Joel Pfister, Olin Professor, has written THE PRODUCTION OF PERSONAL LIFE: CLASS, GENDER, AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IN HAWTHORNE'S FICTION (Stanford University Press, 1991); STAGING DEPTH: EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE POLITICS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOURSE (University of North Carolina Press, 1995); (co-editor of) INVENTING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL: TOWARD A CULTURAL HISTORY OF EMOTIONAL LIFE IN AMERICA (Yale University Press, 1997); INDIVIDUALITY INCORPORATED: INDIANS AND THE MULTICULTURAL MODERN (Duke University Press, 2004), CRITIQUE FOR WHAT? CULTURAL STUDIES, AMERICAN STUDIES, LEFT STUDIES (Paradigm Publishers, 2006) and THE YALE INDIAN: THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ROE CLOUD (Duke University Press, 2009). He teaches a core theory course, "Cultural Power and American Studies," in American Studies as well as English courses in American literature and culture from the colonial period to the present. Professor Pfister has received several fellowships, such as an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and a Rockefeller fellowship, and has lectured in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as well as the United States and Canada. Recently he served as chair of American Studies and after that chair of English. He was a Visiting Scholar in the John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies in the Graduate School in the Freie Universitat in Berlin for the summer term in 2011. In July, 2012, he served on the faculty of the West-China Faculty Enhancement Program in American Studies, co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the China Association for the Study of American Literature, and taught Chinese college and university professors American literature as American Studies in Xi'an, China.

Assistant Professor of English
285 Court Street 309
860-685-3598

Assistant Professor, American Studies

mcgarrett@wesleyan.edu

BA Bard College
MA Stanford University
MPHIL Cambridge University
PHD Stanford University

ENGL203 - 01
Am Lit: Colonial to Civil War

ENGL258 - 01
New World Poetics

ENGL151 - 01
American Revolutions

ENGL380 - 01
In Place of Reading

Personal Homepage:
http://mcgarrett.faculty.wesleyan.edu/

Office Hours:

Office hours: Tuesday, 3-4pm, and by appointment.

Office Location: Center for the Humanities #203

Research Interests:

Matthew Garrett's writing and teaching concern the relationship between literary form and social history. His book, "Out of Many: Episodic Poetics in the Early American Republic" (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), traces an early American and transatlantic culture of the episode across the period's major genres of prose writing -- from wildly plotted novels to peculiarly constructed memoirs and linked serial essays. The book shows how, in ways both magisterial and mundane, social and political conflicts took variegated shape in a literary culture founded upon the episode, that omnipresent narrative unit so often taken for granted by writers and readers. The result is literary history recounted not as the easy victory of grand nationalist ambitions, but rather as a series of social struggles expressed through writers' recurring engagement with incompletely integrated forms. Professor Garrett's work appears in American Quarterly, ELH, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Radical History Review.

Scholarly Keywords:

American literature; literary theory; politics and literature

BA Northwestern University
MA Yale University
MPHIL Yale University
PHD Yale University

AMST248 - 01
Popular Culture/Social Justice

AMST317 - 01
Disability/Embodiment/Technolo

AMST208 - 01
Visual Culture and Violence

AMST260 - 01
Bio-ethics: Animal/Human

Research Interests:

Megan H. Glick specializes in cultural and intellectual history, medical and science history, bioethics and biopolitics, and animal-human studies. Her current book manuscript traces the history of the "human" in 20th century public and scientific cultures, examining the relationship between popular ideas of human rights and the constitution of humanity as a biological category.

Her work appears in American Quarterly (September 2013), Social Text (Fall 2012), and Gender & History (August 2011).

AMST225 - 01
Latinidad: Latina/o Studies

AMST338 - 01
Transnational Feminisms

AMST218 - 01
Queer Studies: An Introduction

AMST344 - 01
Transgender Theory

AMST352 - 01
Diaspora, Border, Migration

BA College of Wooster
PHD Harvard University

AMST175 - 01
Soundscapes in American Cultur

AMST200 - 01
Colonialism & Its Consequences

AMST236 - 01
Religion and National Culture

AMST330 - 01
American Utopias

Office Hours:

Fall 2013:

Research Interests:

Professor of History Patricia Hill specializes in 19th-century U.S. cultural, women, and religious history. Her study, The World Their Household, examines the ways in which the Protestant mission movement worked to produce cultural transformations abroad while reflexively transforming American culture. She has participated in recent regional and national discussions focusing on internationalizing the American Studies curriculum.

Associate Professor of American Studies
255 High Street 205
860-685-3625

ikaramcheti@wesleyan.edu

BA University Calif Santa Bar
MA University Calif Santa Bar
PHD University Calif Santa Bar

AMST120 - 01
The Nobel Writers

AMST200 - 01
Colonialism & Its Consequences

AMST241 - 01
Childhood in America

HUMS614 - 01
Personalizing History

AMST247 - 01
Caribbean Writers in the U.S.

AMST318 - 01
New England and Empire

HUMS622 - 01
The Third Woman

Office Hours:
Fall 2012:  Location: 255 High St #205: Wednesday 10-12

Research Interests:
Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies Indira Karamcheti is an important new voice in the field of postcolonial literature. Her broad ranging interests in the geographics of marginality encompasses Caribbean and African-American literatures.

BA University Calif Berkeley
PHD University Calif Santa Crz

AMST255 - 01
Anarchy in America

AMST314 - 01
U.S. in the Pacific Islands

AMST176 - 01
Race and Citizenship

ANTH111 - 01
Hawai`i: Myths and Realities

Personal Homepage:
http://jkauanui.faculty.wesleyan.edu/

Office Hours:

I will be holding office hours on Mondays from 2-4pm, and by appointment, in my office at the Center for the Americas, room 216.

Research Interests:

See:   http://jkauanui.faculty.wesleyan.edu/  

Scholarly Keywords:

See:   http://jkauanui.faculty.wesleyan.edu/  

Professor of Religion
171 Church Street
860-685-2289

Professor, African American Studies
860-685-2289

Professor, American Studies
860-685-2289

emcalister@wesleyan.edu

BA Vassar College
MA Yale University
MA Yale University
MPHIL Yale University
PHD Yale University

Personal Homepage:
http://emcalister.faculty.wesleyan.edu/

Office Hours:

Spring 2013:  by appointment

Research Interests:

Associate Professor of Religion Elizabeth McAlister is a specialist in the study of African-based religions in the Americas, with a particular focus on Haiti. Her work addresses the broader issues of religion and the social construction of race. She is the author of Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora (University of California Press, 2002).

Publications:
http://emcalister.faculty.wesleyan.edu/

Assistant Professor of English
285 Court Street 202
860-685-3595

Assistant Professor of American Studies
285 Court Street 202
860-685-3595

atang@wesleyan.edu

BA Harvard University
PHD Stanford University

AMST202 - 01
Representing Race Amer Culture

ENGL201L - 01
Ways of Reading: Difference

AMST291 - 01
Afro-Asian Intersections

ENGL230 - 01
Intro to Asian American Lit

Personal Homepage:
http://atang.faculty.wesleyan.edu

Office Hours:

On Sabbatical Leave Spring 2013

Research Interests:

Amy Tang is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between aesthetic form and politics in Asian American literature and theory. She is completing a book, Repetition in Asian American Culture, which explores the politics and poetics of repetition in Asian American literature, art, and criticism. Avoiding the political romanticism that accompanies prevailing understandings of repetition, the book reconsiders the political grammar of trauma, mimicry, intertextuality, pastiche, and self-reflexivity, demonstrating that repetition in Asian American culture is not simply a technology for reclaiming the past but rather a strategy for illuminating, and sometimes modeling alternatives to, the social and cultural contradictions of the present. She holds a Ph.D from Stanford University (2009) and a B.A. from Harvard University (1994).

Scholarly Keywords:

Asian American literature; African American literature; literary and cultural theory and criticism

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Center for the Americas 211
860-685-5754

Associate Professor of American Studies
Center for the Americas 211
860-685-5754

mdweiss@wesleyan.edu

BA University of Chicago
MA Duke University
PHD Duke University

AMST293 - 01
Politics of the Body

AMST419 - 01
Student Forum

ANTH398 - 01
Queer/Anthropology

AMST201 - 01
Critical Queer Studies

ANTH208 - 01
Crafting Ethnography

Personal Homepage:
http://mdweiss.faculty.wesleyan.edu/

Office Hours:

Spring 2013: Monday and Wednesday 1-2 in CAMS 211

Research Interests:

Margot Weiss specializes in the ethnography of contemporary sexual cultures and politics. Her first book, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press) won the 2012 Ruth Benedict Book Prize for best monograph in queer anthropology and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. Her current research with North American queer left activists focuses on the possibilities and parameters of a radical political imagination at a time of economic crisis.  The research is supported by a Wenner-Gren Post-Ph.D. Research Grant, Osmundsen Initiative Award, and CLAGS Joan Heller-Diane Bernard Senior Fellowship in Lesbian and Gay Studies. She has published essays on the politics of BDSM media visibility; on labor, leisure, and commodified sexuality; on the performative effects of BDSM interrogation scenes and the Abu Ghraib photographs; on neoliberalism, homonormativity, and new queer activisms; on methods in queer anthropology; and on left intellectuals and activism in the neoliberal university.

Scholarly Keywords:

anthropology of sexuality and gender, queer studies, social theory

Publications:
http://works.bepress.com/mdweiss/