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Nonfiction Writing by English Faculty at GMU

 

Faculty in the English Department at George Mason University publish in diverse areas of nonfiction: rhetoric and composition, literary studies, cultural studies, film and media studies, technical and scientific studies, linguistics, and creative nonfiction. Audiences addressed include both scholarly and general, in genres from books to book reviews to technical manuals, in print and hypermedia. Below are brief summaries of published writing and current projects. Use the links above or just scroll down. For fuller biographies and e-mail addresses, please visit the link from our main department page. Those faculty with web sites are hyperlinked through their names.

To contact faculty teaching in the undergraduate concentration in nonfiction and editing, the MFA program in creative nonfiction, or the MA program in professional writing and editing, click here.

 

Publications and Current Projects

Denise Albanese is the author of New Science, New World (Duke University Press, 1996); she has also published essays on Shakespeare and film and in performance, and on Tudor-Stuart mathematics. Her current project, Extramural Shakespeare, is a study of non-academic formations around Shakespeare. Albanese is also at work on early modern science and the homoerotic.

Amal Amireh is author of The Factory Girl and the Seamstress: Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Garland 2000), and is co-editor, with Lisa Suhair Majaj of Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland 2000) and Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland, 2002).

David Beach holds a joint appointment in the School of Management and the English Department where he teaches business communications and advanced composition for business majors. Working on his Ph.D. in Instructional Technology, David is exploring ways to improve communication skills, both in writing and orally, in educational settings. Currently, he is working on a research project to investigate the writing needs of pre-professional, non-native speakers of English as they move into upper-level course work.  David’s academic background, besides his current doctoral work in instructional technology, includes a master’s degree in English (linguistics) and TESL (Teacher of English as a Second Language) Certification. He taught management and business English at the Czech Management Center near Prague and at seminars in Central and Eastern Europe.  Prior to his career in academia, David developed and managed educational products at the National Geographic Society and before that was a corporate trainer at MCI.

Scott Berg regularly writes feature articles for the Weekend and county weekly sections of The Washington Post.

Lorraine Brown is a professor in the English Department of George Mason University. Her scholarship and teaching areas have centered on drama: American drama from 1935 to 1955; Post-Colonial drama by women in Australia, Britain, Canada, US., and Scotland, and in sophomore courses contemporary drama and poetry. In 1987 several years of intensive and arduous work culminated in GMU (through her efforts) acquiring on permanent loan the early archival records of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). By design these records were meant to complement /contrast with the Federal Theatre Project archival records then on loan to GMU from the Library of Congress. The ANTA records like the FTP records were unpacked, sorted, and catalogued with her help and under her supervision. As a result of concentrated work by Special Collections and Archives and CGSA and with input from students in classes, a significant proportion of ANTA records have been subsequently scanned by SC&A staff, and will be on-line.

Zofia Burr is the author of Of Women, Poetry, and Power: Strategies of Address in Dickinson, Miles, Brooks, Lorde, and Angelou (U of Illinois P, 2002), and "In the Name of Audre Lorde: The Location of Poetry in the United States," in Articulating the Global and the Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies, Ann Cvetkovich and Douglas Kellner, eds. (Westview Press, 1997). She is also the editor of Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews,and Dialogues, by A.R. Ammons (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996).

Alan Cheuse wrote Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey (Gibbs Smith Press, 1987). His articles, magazine journalism and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Times Travel Section, The Nation, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe Magazine, Houston Post, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, The Antioch Review, and USA Today. His latest book is a collection of essays titled Listening to the Page: Adventures in Reading and Writing.

Keith Clark's book Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2002. He has also published bio-critical essays on Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Anne Spencer, and has contributed essays to the Oxford Companion to African American Literature.

Albert J. DeFazio III's most recent publications include "Celebrating Hemingway: Prospectives and Retrospectives" for The Journal of Foreign Literature and a "Students' Companion

Joel Foreman edited The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons (U of Illinois P, 1996). He also published A first publication is "Filmic Representations for Organizational Analysis: The Characterization of a Transplant Organization in the Film Rising Sun," Journal of Organizational Change (1996).

John Burt Foster, Jr. authored Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (Princeton, 1993). His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetics Today, the Southern Humanities Review, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism (the first translated work in this series), Comparative Literature Today / La Litérature comparée d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Champion), and Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Duke, 1995).

Cynthia Fuchs is film-tv-video editor for PopMatters, and reviews films and popular culture for Pop Politics, Philadelphia City Paper, Reel Images Magazine, and Nitrate. With Chris Holmlund she co-edited Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay Documentary (University of Minnesota Press 1997). Her edited volume of interviews with Spike Lee is forthcoming from the University of Mississippi Press.

Don Gallehr, Director of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, has published "Portfolio Assessment in the College Writing Classroom," in Process and Portfolios in Writing Instruction, NCTE, 1993; "Wait and the Writing Will Come: Meditation and the Composing Process," in Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive, Heinemann, 1994; and "What is the Sound of No Hand Clapping: Using Secularized Zen Koans in the Writing Classroom," in Spiritual Empowerment and Pedagogy, Heinemann, Boynton/Cook.

Beth George is a writer and researcher for The Bulldog, a publication of Parents Against Corruption & Cover-up (PACC).

Stephen Goodwin has published reviews and nonfiction in the Washington Post and Country Journal, in addition to his published novels and short stories.

Byron Hawk is editor of Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. He has published review articles in Enculturation, Post Script, and Technical Communication Quarterly, hypertexts in Kairos and Pre-Text Electra Lite, an entry in the new Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, and has forthcoming articles in an edited volume entitled The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film in Technical Communication Quarterly.

Devon Hodges, Managing Editor of English Matters, co-authored with Janice Doane From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the "Good Enough" Mother (University of Michigan, 1992). In 1987 she and Doane co-authored Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (Methuen). Her Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1985, and her most recent book, Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire was published by the Univeristy of Michigan Press in 2001.

Lorna Irvine has published three books--Sub/Version: Canadian Fictions By Women; Collecting Clues: Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm; Critical Spaces: Margaret Laurence and Janet Frame--a dozen essays and book chapters, and several dozen book reviews or book review essays.

Rosemary Jann's published The Art and Science of Victorian History in1985. Recent articles like "Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body" (ELH 1990) and "Darwin and the Anthropologists: Sexual Selection and Its Discontents" (Victorian Studies 1994)explore how texts ranging from popular literature to scientific theory work to construct ideological assumptions about social difference. Her more recent book is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (1995).

Joyce Johnston published an article on the teaching of ethics in business classes in Business Communication Quarterly in December 1998. A 1997 article, "Weaving A Syllaweb: Considerations Before Constructing an On-line Syllabus," was recently selected for inclusion in ERIC, the national education database.

Deborah Kaplan published Jane Austen among Women (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and has also published several articles on Austen, including "Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen's Female Friendships" in Approaches to Teaching Austen's Pride and Prejudice, ed. Marcia Folsom (Modern Language Association, 1993). Her current research is on twentieth-century British and American revivals of Restoration comedies, and she has published a slice of it, "Representing the Nation: Restoration Comedies on the Early Twentieth-Century London Stage," in Theatre Survey (November 1995).

David Kaufman is the author of The Business of Common Life (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) and several articles on Adorno and the Frankfurt School. He is currently working on a book on the later works of the painter, Philip Guston.

Winifred Gleeson Keaney has published broadly in Medieval Studies.

Michael Kelley has authored two books: Flamboyant Drama (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), and A Parents' Guide to Television (New York: John Wiley & Co., 1983). He is also the author of numerous articles on medieval literature and on television in both scholarly and general interest publications.

David Kuebrich's scholarship on Whitman has explicated the religious dimensions of Whitman's poetry while placing the author within the context of antebellum American religion. Subsequent work on Melville, Mary Gordon and Tim O'Brien emphasizes the religious and political dimensions of their texts. He is also working on a study of recent American religion and politics.

Roger Lathbury recently published a critical study of The Great Gatsby. Since 1983, he has published 100 books by other writers, many of them collections of original poetry, with his publishing company, Orchises Press.

Beverly Lowry Lowry recently published Crossed Over, a nonfiction memoir about the murder committed by Karla Faye Tucker in Texas. Her essays, profiles, and book reviews have been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Granta, and many other journals. Her current work is a biography of xxxx.

Robert Matz has published essays on Shakespeare and on Renaissance poetry and poetic theory, as well as a book, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He is presently working on a book on Shakespeare's sonnets.

William Miller, Director of Writing Programs at GMU, is a former journalist and Washington correspondent.

Marilyn Mobley McKenzie's articles have been published in The Southern Review, The Colby Library Quarterly, and The Women's Review of Books. Her first book of criticism, Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative, was published in 1991 by Louisiana State University Press. Her work in-progress, titled Spaces for the Reader, is a study of Toni Morrison's narrative poetics and cultural politics.

Ellen Moody's publications are in the area of Renaissance, 17th, 18th and 19th century literature. Her recent book is about Anthony Trollope and her experience of leading group conversations on the Net (Trollope on the Net, published by Hambledon Press and the Trollope Society).

Robert Nadeau has published seven books in the areas of science and literature, the history and philosophy of science, neuroscience, nuclear disarmament, and the culture conflict between humanists- social scientists and scientists-engineers: Readings From the New Book on Nature, (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), Nature Talks Back, (Alexandria, Virginia: Orchises Press, 1984), The Conscious Universe: Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory (NewYork: Springer-Verlag, 1990), Mind, Machines and Human Consciousness, (Chicago: Contemporary Books,1991), Sh/e Brain: Science and Sexual Politics (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger,1996), The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Modern Physics and Biology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1999), The Wealth of Nature: How Mainstream Economics Failed the Environment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), .He is currently completing a book on mainstream economics and the environmental crisis: "The Ecological Mind: Living Within the Limits of Planetary Resources".

Poet Eric Pankey's essays and reviews have appeared widely in such journals as Antaeus, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The Partisan Review, and The Kenyon Review.

Cynthia Patterson, a Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies GMU, is pursuing her dissertation project on the "Philly Pictorials," a group of illustrated middle-class monthly magazines published primarily in Philadelphia in the 1840s and 1850s.

John Radner has written articles on various 18 century topics, especially Swift and Johnson. His current scholarly project is a book-length study of the relationship between Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, five sections of which have been published or accepted for publication

Jeannette Roan's essay "Travels to Asia and the Pacific in Early Cinema" appears in the anthology Re/collecting Early Asian America: Readings in Cultural History. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript about travel, exoticism, and cinema from high imperialism to global culture tentatively titled Fictions of Faraway Places.

Amelia Rutledge has published articles on the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon, on the figure of Merlin, on philosophy in the works of Italo Calvino, and on the use of Darwin in late nineteenth-century music criticism to discredit the theories of Richard Wagner. Current research centers on children's literature, most recently the authors Robin McKinley, E. Nesbit, and Philip Pullman.

Suzanne Scott's book reviews have appeared in Publisher's Weekly and Belles Lettre. Her creative nonfiction appears regularly in small press and women's publications. She is the co-founder of Woman's Monthly, a regional publication for women, and she served as managing editor there from 1990-1995. Her current projects include writing creative nonfiction on topics of ageism, female sexuality and gender inequity, and collaborating on installation/performance art exhibitions that focus on race, class and gender.

Debra Lattanzi Shutika has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and the U.S. with Mexican laborers from Guanajuato, Mexico who currently work in the mushroom industry in southeastern Pennsylvania. Her current book project is grounded in this research.

Christopher Thaiss has authored or edited ten books, most recently WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Programs in Writing across the Curriculum (with Susan McLeod, Eric Miraglia,and Margot Soven)(1998) and a series of discipline-specific writing guides in psychology, theatre, and law enforcement (1999-2000) that he co-wrote with faculty in those fields.

Scott Trafton is currently finishing his book Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania, forthcoming from Duke University Press. He has written articles or delivered papers on nineteenth-century African American art and architecture, the history of American archaeology, early blues culture, swing music, and African American intellectual history.

Cloe Vincent is a Ph.D. candidate scheduled to defend her dissertation, (Con)Texts and Constructions from the Writing Class: Ethnographic Research in Literacy Studies, at the University of South Florida in March of 2000. She is the coeditor of Voices and Visions: Refiguring Ethnography in Composition published by Heinemann Boynton/Cook in 1997, and the winner of the 1997 Florida Center for Writers Award for Distinguished Scholarship.

Anna Vogt co-authored Conversations in Context: Identity, Knowledge and Writing in the University, a composition and rhetoric textbook published by Harcourt Brace in 1998.

David R. Williams is the author of Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind (A.U.P. 1987); Revolutionary War Sermons (Scholars Facsimiles, 1982); and Sin Boldly!: Dr. Dave's irreverent Guide to Acing the College Paper (Dr Dave pub, 1994).
He is assistant editor of LOUDOUN ART, a bi-monthly review of the arts in Northern Virginia, part-time columnist for The Blue Ridge Leader, and occasional contributor to the Washington Post.

Alok Yadav has published essays and reviews on issues of nationalism and on eighteenth-century British literature, and is currently completing a book manuscript titled, The Empire of English: Literature and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Margaret Yocom has published articles with accompanying photographs on ethnographic fieldwork, regional study, ethnopoetics, family folklore, gender, and material culture. Her most recent work includes "Exuberance in Control: The Dialogue of Ideas in the Tales and Fan Towers of Woodsman William Richard of Phillips, Maine" in Northeast Folklore: Essays in Honor of Edward D. Ives (2000) and "The Yellow Ribboning of the USA: Contested Meanings in the Construction of a Political Symbol" (1996).
She is the assistant editor of Ugiuvangmiut Quliapyuit: King Island Tales (1988); and in 1994, she edited, produced, and wrote most of the text of Logging in the Maine Woods: The Paintings of Alden Grant. She is writing a book on the traditional art of a Maine logging family, entitled Generations in Wood.

Terry Myers Zawacki's article "How Portfolios for Proficiency Help Shape a WAC Program," co-authored with Chris Thaiss, is included in WAC and Program Assessment. "Is It Still WAC: Writing in Learning Communities," another co-authored article, appears in WAC for the New Millennium. NCTE 2001. "Telling Stories: The Subject Is Never Just Me," an article in a collection on authority and teaching writing appears in "Questioning Authority: Stories Told In School" by U.Michigan Press, 2000. "Questioning Alternative Discourses: Reports from Across the Disciplines," co-authored with Chris Thaiss for a volume on alternative discourses is forthcoming from Heineman Press.

 

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