Senate Faculty

Elizabeth Abel

Professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English
20th- and 21st-Century British
20th- and 21st-Century American
African American
Cultural Studies
Gender & Sexuality Studies

My work spans two broad fields of inquiry. The first is gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction (with a focus on Virginia Woolf). My first book, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), uncovered the legacies of Freud and Melanie Klein in Woolf’s narrative strategies. My new book Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies (2024), explores the afterlives of Virginia Woolf in unexpected places and cultural traditions across the twentieth century: not the popular cultural appropriations, but the subtle resonances and subtextual...

Hilton Als

Teaching Professor

Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theatre critic in 2002. He began contributing to the magazine in 1989, writing pieces for The Talk of the Town.

Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” His first book, “...

Oliver Arnold

Associate Professor
Renaissance and Early Modern
Drama

I work on Shakespeare; 16th- and 17th-century literature, philosophy, and political history; and contemporary political philosophy.

Sukanya Banerjee

Associate Professor
19th-Century British
South Asian
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
Narrative & the Novel

Sukanya Banerjee works on the literature and culture of Victorian Britain and its empire. More broadly, she is interested in postcolonial studies, ecology, studies of transnationalism and diaspora, political theory, and South Asia. Her book, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Duke University Press, 2010), which was awarded the NVSA Sonya Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian studies, locates the liberal discourse of citizenship outside the conventional...

Stephen M. Best

Professor & Rachael Anderson Stageberg Chair in English; Director, Townsend Center for the Humanities
19th-Century American
African American
Critical Theory
Film

Stephen Best's scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an...

C. D. Blanton

Member, Program in Critical Theory
Critical Theory
19th-Century British
Poetry
20th- and 21st-Century British

Vikram Chandra

Teaching Professor
Creative Writing

Writer, teacher. Avid amateur student of pre-modern Indian literature, aesthetics, philosophy, Sanskrit, languages, and history. Programmer.

John Alba Cutler

Associate Professor
20th- and 21st-Century American
Chicanx and/or Latinx
Poetry

John Alba Cutler researches in the fields of Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literature and culture; his teaching comprises courses in these fields as well as in modern and contemporary American literature. His book Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford, 2015) argues that Chicano/a/x literature provides a powerful counter-discourse to sociological accounts of assimilation in the post-WWII era. He is now working on a book tentatively titled “Latinx Modernism and the Spirit of Latinoamericanismo,” which examines the influence of Latin American modernismo on...

Mark Danner

Professor and Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education
20th- and 21st-Century British
20th- and 21st-Century American
Narrative & the Novel

Mark Danner has written widely on foreign affairs and politics for more than three decades. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Danner has covered war and political conflict in Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and, most recently, the story of torture during the War on Terror. He also writes frequently on American politics...

Kathleen Donegan

Associate Professor, Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. Distinguished Chair in Writing
Early American
Native American
Atlantic
Caribbean

Kathleen Donegan (Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University) writes and teaches about literature and culture in early America, from New World encounters through the first decades of the republic. She is the author of Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Penn, 2014), a book about the deeply unsettling history of early English colonial settlement in Native America. It investigates how an acute relationship between suffering and violence in those crisis-ridden outposts...