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Faculty Listing

Chair

Sean McCann

Professor of EnglishShow Bio and Photo

Faculty

Leticia Alvarado

Visiting Instructor in EnglishShow Bio

Sally Bachner

Associate Professor of EnglishShow Bio

Lois Brown

Professor of African American StudiesShow Bio and Photo

Clifford Chase

Visiting WriterShow Bio and Photo

Lisa Cohen

Assistant Professor of EnglishShow Bio and Photo

Christina Crosby

Professor of EnglishShow Bio and Photo

Rachel Ellis Neyra

Assistant Professor of EnglishShow Bio

Harris Friedberg

Associate Professor of EnglishShow Bio

Matthew Garrett

Assistant Professor of EnglishShow Bio and Photo

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

Assistant Professor, American Studies

Faculty Fellow

mcgarrett@wesleyan.edu

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

Fall 2012

ENGL203 - 01
Am Lit: Colonial to Civil War

ENGL303 - 01
Narrative Theory

ENGL407 - 01
Senior Tutorial

ENGL409 - 29
Senior Thesis Tutorial

Spring 2013

AMST420 - 01
Student Forum

CHUM321 - 01
In Place of Reading

ENGL402 - 18
Individual Tutorial, Undergrad

ENGL410 - 29
Senior Thesis Tutorial

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. He is completing a book, "Episodic Poetics in the Early American Republic," which 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 recent essay projects include studies of the relationship between the money form and the emergence of the notion of "career" in Benjamin Franklin's "Autobiography;" of ideas about social competition in relation to the political economy of mothering in the eighteenth century; and of the way serialized histories in the 1780s produced an account of the American Revolution as a "pseudo-revolution." He teaches courses on American literature and literary theory, including courses on the literature of revolution, transatlantic poetry and poetics, the novel, and narrative theory.

Scholarly Keywords:

American literature; literary theory; politics and literature

Alan Gilbert

Visiting WriterShow Bio

Anne Greene

Director of Writing ProgramsShow Bio

Alice Hadler

Associate Dean for International Student AffairsShow Bio and Photo

Adina Hoffman

Visiting Writer in EnglishShow Bio

Leslie Jamison

Visiting WriterShow Bio

Natasha Korda

Professor of EnglishShow Bio and Photo

Dorothea Lasky

Visiting Writer in EnglishShow Bio

Sarah Mahurin

Visiting Assistant Professor of EnglishShow Bio

Douglas Martin

Visiting Assistant Professor of EnglishShow Bio

Alice Moore

Visiting Instructor in EnglishShow Bio

Marguerite Nguyen

Assistant Professor of EnglishShow Bio

Ruth Nisse

Associate Professor of EnglishShow Bio and Photo

Joel Pfister

Professor of EnglishShow Bio and Photo

Professor of English
Downey House 303
860-685-3603

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

Olin Professor of English
860-685-3603

jpfister@wesleyan.edu

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

Spring 2013

AMST204 - 01
Junior Coll Cul Pwr & Amer St

AMST404 - 08
Dept/Program Project or Essay

ENGL175 - 01
Staging America

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.