Page Delano

Picture of Page    Delano


Associate Professor

EMAIL: pdelano@bmcc.cuny.edu

Office: N-751N

Office Hours:

Phone: +1 (212) 220-8000;ext=5193

Associate Professor Page Delano has been teaching at BMCC since 2004. Before that time, she was an academic advisor in the Honors College at Hunter College, CUNY, and taught widely throughout CUNY, as well as at Barnard College. Her collection of poems, No One with a Past Is Safe, was published by Word Press in 2002. Her academic writing focuses on women and war, with an emphasis on American women during World War II. “I am concerned with women’s citizenship, especially since women, like people of color, did not have full citizenship until the 1960s,” says Professor Delano. She lives in Brooklyn. Her scholarly publications, and a short list of poems published are noted in the publications section, below.

Expertise

World War II American Society , War, Genocide, Gender

Degrees

  • B.A. history, University of Maryland Eastern Shore,1981
  • Johns Hopkins University, The Writing Seminars (creative writing — poetry),1983
  • Ph.D. English (American studies/ cultural studies), The Graduate Center, City University of New York,1996

Courses Taught

ENG 101 (English Composition)
ENG 353 (Women in Literature)

Research and Projects

  • “Border Crossing: Women’s Flights Across the Spanish Border, 1939-1945” — for the PSC-CUNY Grant awarded April 2008

    PSC CUNY grant proposal, Fall 2007  (cycle 39)

       This is the beginning of the description of my project for this grant: 

    Border Crossing: Women’s Flights Across the Spanish Border, 1939-1945

     

    “I found a place where it is easy to cross”

    –postcard written by an American, found in a flea market, Plaza Major, Madrid, January 2003

               

     

    This is an essay in its early stages that emerges from my broader work about women and World War II. I will focus on American women crossing the French-Spanish border at the close of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II.  This interest grows out of a conference paper for a panel on “women on the road,” “Traveling Women in France” (at the Popular Culture Association last spring).  The essay perhaps has its roots as well in the postcard I encountered in Madrid’s busy flea market at the Place Major not far from elegant, bourgeois gift shops which sold small dolls of Franco, along with those of Mussolini and Hitler.  That this anonymous voice of most likely a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (I didn’t buy the card) should be floating in the same community as this reactionary nostalgia and historical confusion has troubled me for a long time.  Then, this past July, I briefly crossed the border from France into Spain, seeking the grave of Walter Benjamin and the monument that commemorates him.  A German “stateless” Jew in exile in Paris, and cultural critic associated with the  Frankfurt School,  Benjamin had made the difficult trek across the Pyrenees in September 1940.  Upon discovering that he would be forced to return to France, he took his life, and was buried in a nameless grave in Portbou.  Returning to France on a majestic narrow road above the ragged Mediterranean coast, I came upon workers refurbishing a monument in homage to the “100,000 men, women, and children, Spanish Republicans and Internationalists” who crossed from Spain in the Portbou-Cerbère region in February 1939…. 

  • Red Heads
    I am working on a collaborative memoir with two other women, about our years as radical organizers in the 1970s/1980s.  I lived in southern West Virginia, where my husband was a coal miner, active in the wildcat strikes of the 1970s.

    Publications

    • “One Million Bras” and “Baltic Street in Blue.” Affilia, Journal of Women and Social Work , Vol. 1 No. 3, Fall 2006. Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage , 344-5.
    • “Men Carry,” “Poem after Buying Bread”, Hanging Loose
    • “Lucie Aubrac,” “Literature of World War II,U.S.” and “WW II Posters, Portrayal of Women.” Women and War Encyclopedia, ed. Bernard Cook, Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO,
    • “After Cavell: “Continual Ban, Continual Divorce in American Films, 1939-1961” for After Intimacy: The Culture of Divorce in the West since 1789, eds. Karl Leydecker and Nicholas White, Introduction by Stanley Cavell, , European Connections Volume 10, Bern, Switzerland and New York: Peter Lang Publishers. 2007
    • “Self-Rescuer.” Saint Ann’s Review, Vol. 6 No.1, Winter 2006, Brooklyn, NY. 88-90.,
    • “Loving Occupiers: Kay Boyle’s Critique of Power in Occupied Germany in The Smoking Mountain.” Kay Boyle for the Twenty-First Century: New Essays, ed. Thomas Austenfeld, Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag
    • No One with a Past Is Safe (poetry collection), Word Press
    • “Making Up for War: Sexuality and Citizenship in Wartime Culture,” Feminist Studies , 2000 26(1): 33-68.

      Download
    • “Friendship Intensified by War: Kay Boyle and Mary Reynolds” , E-rea Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone

    Honors, Awards and Affiliations

    PSC-CUNY Grant 2008-2009 Support for research/writing project: American Women Crossing the Spanish Border, 1936-1945BMCC Faculty Development Grant 2007-2008“Gal or Pal: The Girl Problem, Citizenship, and Posters of World War II”  –a study of concerns about loose lips, loose women and venereal disease.Participant, NYU Faculty Resource Network, June 2006.Seminar on “New York City and the Cosmopolitan Ideal” PSC-CUNY Grant, 2005-6.“Loose Lips Sink Ships: Sexuality and Citizenship”Semifinalist, Walt Whitman Prize, Academy of American Poets, 2000for poetry manuscripts No One with a Past Is Safe, and Body of Water, Fellow, Mellon Seminar, CUNY Graduate Center, Summer 2000.“The 1950s,” with Morris DicksteinSalzburg Fellow, Salzburg Seminar, 2006Salzburg, Austria, July 26 – August 2, 2006Residency Fellowship, Yaddo, summer 1996.Residency Fellowships, Blue Mountain Center, 1995, 1990. Chancellor’s FellowshipA fellowship for academic year 2014/2015 to work on my project about American women in Europe during the Long World War II

    Additional Information

    Professor Delano has taught new Special Topics courses at BMCC including Literature of the Vietnam War and Literature of Genocide.