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Associate Professor, English
Co-Coordinator, Writing Across the Curriculum
Expertise
Multicultural Literature of the United States, Literature of U.S. Latino/as, Italian American literature, Immigrant Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Feminist Theory, Contemporary Fiction, Asian American Literatures, American Literature, Motherhood Studies
Degrees
- B.A. Hartwick College, English,1996
- M.A. Brooklyn College, CUNY, English,2000
- Ph.D. Graduate Center of the City University of New York, English,2007
Courses Taught
- Students placed in ENG 100.5 are offered extra support, afforded through additional instructional time. Students completing ENG 100.5 will have mastered the fundamentals of college-level reading and writing, including developing a thesis-driven response to the writing of others and following the basic conventions of citation and documentation. They will have practiced what Mike Rose calls the "habits of mind" necessary for success in college and in the larger world: summarizing, classifying, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing. Students will be introduced to basic research methods and MLA documentation and complete a research project. Students are required to take a departmental final exam that requires the composition of a 500 word thesis-driven essay in conversation with two texts. Successful completion of this course is equivalent to passing ENG 101.
Prerequisite: English Proficiency Index of 55-64 or a score of 43-5 on the CAT-W and exemption from ACR 95 or successful completion of ACR 95. This course is not open to ESL students.
Course Syllabus - English Composition is the standard freshman writing course. The course introduces students to academic writing. By its conclusion, students will be ready for English 201 and for the writing they will be asked to do in advanced courses across the curriculum. Students completing ENG 101 will have mastered the fundamentals of college-level reading and writing, including developing a thesis-driven response to the writing of others and following the basic conventions of citation and documentation. They will have practiced what Mike Rose calls the "habits of mind" necessary for success in college and in the larger world: summarizing, classifying, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing. Students will be introduced to basic research methods and MLA documentation and complete a research project. Students are required to take a departmental final exam that requires the composition of a 500 word, thesis-driven essay in conversation with two designated texts.
Prerequisite: Pass the CAT-R and CAT-W or Accuplacer tests
Course Syllabus - This is a course that builds upon skills introduced in English 101. In this course, literature is the field for the development of critical reading, critical thinking, independent research, and writing skills. Students are introduced to literary criticisms and acquire basic knowledge necessary for the analysis of texts (including literary terms and some literary theory); they gain proficiency in library and internet research; and they hone their skills as readers and writers. Assignments move from close readings of literary texts in a variety of genres to analyses that introduce literary terms and broader contexts, culminating in an independent, documented, thesis-driven research paper. By the conclusion of English 201, students will be prepared for the analytical and research-based writing required in upper-level courses across the curriculum; they will also be prepared for advanced courses in literature.
Prerequisite: ENG 101
Course Syllabus - This course acquaints students with the wide range and varied forms of the short story as it developed in America, Europe, and other continents. Readings will include works by male and female authors of different periods and nationalities, and some attention may be paid to the historical development of the short story as a genre, as well as the cultural contexts in which the assigned stories were written.
Pre-Requisite: ENG101 and ENG201 or ENG121
Course Syllabus - Representative works reflecting the collective experiences of Asian American writers are analyzed. Fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction written from Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian cultural perspectives are discussed. Prerequisite: ENG 201 or ENG 121 NOTE: ASN 339 satisfies requirements for a third semester of the English sequence.
- This course will focus on a specific theme, concept, cultural milieu, or major author to be announced in advance. Topics for the following semester will be made available by the English Department during registration. Each section of the course will cover in-depth a single special topic, such as one of the following: the Harlem Renaissance, Literature and the Environment, Utopian and Dystopian Literature, Literature and Medicine, The Beat Generation, Literature of the Working Class, Satire in the 18th Century, Censorship and Literature, Literature of Immigration, War in Literature, Madness and Inspiration in Literature, Gay and Lesbian Literature, and Women in Shakespeare. Prerequisites: ENG 101 and 201, or ENG 121
Course Syllabus Italian American literature surveys fiction, poetry, and drama throughout the history of Italian Americans in the United States beginning in the first half of the twentieth century and continuing into contemporary America. This literature will be considered in the context of recurring themes in the artistically framed experiences of Italian Americans beginning in the first half of the twentieth century and continuing into contemporary America: cultural-national identity conflict, anti-colonization by church and state, religion, gender relations, generational differences and relations, class conflict, for example working class vs.the bourgeois, or working class immigrant and sons and daughters vs. the dominant American culture, the problem of education in early Italian American history, the dilemma of cultural and linguistic loss, intercultural conflict, intracultural conflict, family values, oppression, social dysfunction, and assimilation.
Prerequisites: ENG 101 and 201, or ENG 121
Course Syllabus- This is a lower-level remedial writing course in which students are introduced to the fundamentals of writing, including punctuation, spelling, grammar, word choice, sentence structure, and paragraphing. Students are given frequent in-class writing exercises that focus on narration and description as modes of developing ideas. Conferences with instructors are frequent. This course is for students who score below 43 on the CATW, and it prepares them for English 095.
Course Syllabus - This is an upper-level intensive developmental writing course for students scoring between 43 and 55 on the CATW. Students are instructed in basic components of effective writing, including word selection, punctuation, spelling, grammar, sentence structure and paragraph development. Students are given frequent in-class writing exercises that focus on argumentation, narrative, and description as modes of developing ideas. Individual conferences with instructors are frequent.
Course Syllabus - In this course, works reflecting the experiences of U.S. Latino/a writers in English are analyzed. Students will read, discuss, and write about fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama by writers such as Julia Alvarez, Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria Anzaldua, Roberto Fernandez, Tato Laviera, Achy Obejas, Abraham Rodriguez Jr., and Piri Thomas. Note: Crosslisted with LAT 338
Course Syllabus - 3 CRS.3 HRS.NULL LAB HRS.ENG 382 (American Literature from the Reconstruction Era to the Present)
- Though English 381 is not a prerequisite, this course begins where 381 leaves off and covers select fiction and poetry from the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century to the present. Students study major writers and literary movements; and an effort is made to place literature in its cultural context. Works by such writers as Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Richard Wright, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Toni Morrison may be included.
Course Syllabus
Research and Projects
- Dorothy Bryan’s Politics of Education in Ella Price’s Journal and Miss Giardino
- Representations of embodied maternity in contemporary American fiction
- Representations of maternity and motherhood in graphic narrative
Publications
- “Building a Home for Feminist Pedagogy.” With Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34 (3/4), Envy (Fall – Winter, 2006), pp. 287-290 December 2006, p 287-290. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40003559
- Living Death: Loss, Mourning, and Ethnic Renewal in Contemporary American Fiction, VDM Verlag Dr, Muller, 2008. pps. 190.
- “Visual Aid: Teaching H.D.’s Imagist Poetry with the Assistance of Henri Matisse”, Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, Winter 2008.
- “On Women, Bodies, and Nation: Zoe Wicomb’s Feminist Critique in David’s Story”, Journal of African Studies, 67 (3), April 2008, pp. 33-47.https://doi.org/10.1080/00020180801943081
- “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?: Afflicted Fathers and Endangered Daughters in Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter.” Journal of Men’s Studies, 19(3), Fall 2011, pp. 191-208. DOI: 10.3149/jms.191https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3149/jms.1903.191
- “Ash Imagery in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker.” The Explicator. 71.1(March 2013): 65-68.
- “Body, Text, and Image in Tatana Keller’s Fifty Years of Silence.” in Picturing the Language of Images, Eds. Nancy Pedri and Laurence Petit, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 217-228.
- “Loving the Unlovable Body in Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre,” Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies, 7(5), 2016, p. 39-53. https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/aaldp/vol7/iss1/5
- “Contemporary Stories of Female Development and the Outer Limits of Maternal Sexuality in Susan Choi’s My Education and Amy Sohn’s Prospect Park West”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Published online Sept. 11, 2019. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QF7YKZKK58W27JRNUMQY/full?target=10.1080/00111619.2019.1665491
- “The Scandalous Breast: Confronting the Sexual-Maternal Dichotomy in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Susan Choi’s My Education“, in Mothers, Sex and Sexuality, Ed. Holly Zwalf, Michelle Walks, and Joani Mortenson. Demeter Press, June 2020.
Honors, Awards and Affiliations
- PSC-CUNY Research Grant, 2009
- The Irving Howe Dissertation Year Fellowship for Work in Politics and Literature, 2006
- BMCC Faculty Development Grant 2012.
- PSC-CUNY Grant, Summer 2016
- BMCC Faculty Publication Program, 2016-2017
- Master Teacher, BMCC Teaching Academy 2015-2018
- Diana Hacker Award in the category of Fostering Student Success at the Two-Year College English Association (TCEA) for “The BMCC Teaching Academy: Building a Teaching College One Cohort at a Time”
with Professors John Beaumont, Nancy Derbyshire, and Jeffrey Gonzalez - Selected participant in NEH-funded Summer Institute, Building Asian American Studies across the Community College Classroom.
