Gender and Sexuality
Gender and Sexuality studies at UB bring together faculty from a wide range of feminist traditions and methods, including rhetorical, literary, and cultural studies, and it encourages interdisciplinary scholarship as a critical means recognizing marginalized cultures, texts, and social movements. Engaged with UB’s large international community and its strength in transnational critical studies, many feminist faculty study the implications for women in the shifting relations between host nations and homelands, individual and nation, crossgendered and crossracial formations. The confluence of research on globalization, transnationalism, and feminism allows graduate students to develop their work in a complex, twenty-first century frame. |
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In addition to the English department’s strength, the Institute for Education and Research on Women and Gender provides, research, scholarship, and grant support; annual conferences, and an international film festival. The Division of Transnational Critical Studies and the Global Gender Studies department offer many allied faculty.
English Faculty Working on Gender and Sexuality issues
Rachel Ablow works on Victorian literature, the history and theory of the novel, the history and theory of reading, and affect studies. Her first book, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford UP, 2007) examines how forms of sympathetic engagement within texts, particularly that between husbands and wives, models and problematizes the forms of sympathetic engagements elicited from readers. Recently she has edited a special issue of Victorian Studies on "Victorian Emotions." She has also edited The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature (University of Michigan Press, 2010). She is currently at work on a project tentatively entitled, "Feeling Otherwise: Pain and Intersubjectivity in Victorian Literature."
Carrie Tirado Bramen is an Associate Professor of English and Executive Director of the UB Humanities Institute. She teaches courses in nineteenth-century US literature and culture, critical race theory, and US Latino/a literature. Recent seminars include 19c Travel Writing, women’s writing, American 1890’s, critical race theory in a 19c context. She is the author of The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Harvard 2000), which was co-winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first book. She is also the recipient of three teaching awards including the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is currently working on a book on niceness; and her most recent (and forthcoming publications) are about Leslie Fiedler; Henry James and literary pragmatism; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘nice’ Jesus; and 19c Latin American travel writing to the US and the question of flirtation.
Tim Dean is Professor English and teaches psychoanalysis and queer studies. His latest book Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (University of Chicago Press, 2009) was chosen as one of "The Top Ten Books of 2009" by Amazon.com, the only university press book to make this list. His current research includes a book titled "Ethics of the Impersonal."
Stacy Carson Hubbard is Associate Professor of English. Her teaching and research interests in the field of nineteenth century American literature focus on reform writings (transcendentalism, abolition, woman rights), sentimentalism, science writing, and visual art and photography. She also has interests in the 1890s that include architecture, urban design and visual culture. She teaches courses on American Reform Writing, Domestic Literature, American Poetry, Emersonian Poetics, Earthbound Transcendentalism, and The Real and the Spectacular in America: 1880-1930. Current projects include a book-length study of the intersections of sympathy and self-reliance in nineteenth century literature and culture; an essay on Emerson, Thoreau and friendship; and an essay on voice and religious authority in the career of Sojourner Truth. Professor Hubbard is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship sponsored by the MLA.
Jim Holstun has changed his focus from early modern England and America to the twentieth century, with emphasis on communist and anti-colonial writers. He has published on Renaissance English lesbianism and on the radical prophetess, Anna Trapnel. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in early modern women’s writing, premodern gay and lesbian literature, feminist Marxism, and Arab women writers. He is now working on the resistance feminism of Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh (essays, interview) and on the fiction, journalism, and biography of the American communist, Agnes Smedley (essay, maybe a book)..
Arabella Lyon works in the intersection of feminism, politics, and rhetoric. Early work included historical reclamations of Susanne Langer and feminist theorizations of historiography. Currently she examines representations of human rights, investigating how rights negotiations particularly affect women. In this vein, she has written on representations of the 100 million missing women in Asia and co-edited a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, “Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing” (forthcoming 2011). Her manuscript, “Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights,” demonstrates the constitutive nature of utterance and shows that the performance or act of political rhetoric creates a culture’s citizens--the subject of rights--and its definitions of justice. Related work includes the Ross Winterowd Award winning Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored. (Penn State UP, 1998) and articles in Philosophy and Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication, and College English.
Carine Mardorossian specializes in postcolonial and feminist studies. Her book Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (U of Virginia P, 2005) theorizes the crossings of gender and race in a new generation of immigrant women writers in the United States. She teaches feminist theory and has published in feminist journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She is currently completing a book project entitled Reframing the Victim: National Identity and Masculinity in the Contemporary United States.
Cristanne Miller is Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature and chair of the English Department. Almost all her publications have been on female poets and directly concerned with questions of gender and language, or gender, sexuality, and culture. In 1987, she published Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar (Harvard UP); in 1996, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Harvard UP), and in 2005, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-Schüler (U of Michigan P). She also co-edited the Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (Knopf, 1997). Among several other edited collections, she has co-edited Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (with Lynn Keller, U of MI Press, 1994) and The Women and Language Debate: A Sourcebook (with Camille Roman and Suzanne Juhasz, Rutgers1994; Online edition with netlibrary.com, 1999). Additionally, she has published on American Civil War poetry, late nineteenth-century American literature, and Walt Whitman.
Joseph Valente works on operation of gender and sexuality in late and postcolonial Irish literature. His James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (1995) was the first book in Joyce studies to treat questions of gender and colonialism in relation to one another; his edited special issue Joyce and Homosexuality and his edited volume Quare Joyce (1997) were the first books to take up Joyce's writing from a queer theory perspective. He has since explored these issues from different angles in Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood (2002) and in his new book, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture: 1880-1922.
Hershini Young specializes in contemporary black diasporic literature and queer studies. She is the author of Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body (Dartmouth, 2005). Courses she has taught include Gender, Sexuality and Race; Black Performance Studies; Black Queer Studies.
