Department of English

Paula Backscheider specializes in long eighteenth-century literature (1640-1840), the rise of modern popular culture, performance theory, feminist criticism, and cultural studies.  She is at work on a book on the influence of French feminist fairy tales on the English novel, and with her co-editor Catherine Ingrassia of Virginia Commonwealth University has recently completed British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press.  She chairs the Research Initiative for the Study of Diversity and is a member of other university-level committees.  She especially welcomes new MA and PhD students who come to the department with interests in eighteenth-century studies and enjoys the energetic group of graduate students already working in the field.  One graduated in the summer with a dissertation on the changing concept of citizenship, and others are working on women’s war poetry, on women’s novels, and on performances by and about “losers.”

James Goldstein specializes in late-medieval English and Scottish literature.  He is on the editorial board for the medieval section of the online peer-reviewed journal Blackwell Literary Compass, and he serves on the council of the Scottish Text Society.  His current book project, however, is not a work of medieval scholarship but is conceived instead as a defense of older forms of poetry, focusing on the question of literary value through a study of lyric poetry chiefly from the 16th through 18th centuries.  It has become unfashionable in literature departments to defend the aesthetic value of literature or argue in favor of traditional literary canons.  Yet one need not embrace the reactionary agenda of cultural conservatives who denounce recent trends in literary scholarship to believe that the last few decades of the canon wars have narrowed chronological and generic horizons in astonishing ways.  A new defense of older poetry will require a critical examination of the criteria for poetic excellence through a rereading of the early history of poetics.   A research leave in Spring 2009 will assist the work in progress.

My special areas of teaching and research are modern/contemporary drama—essentially Ibsen through the present—and literary theory, especially postmodernism and poststructuralism. My long-range research project examines how selected modern and contemporary dramatists from Ibsen to Spalding Gray have used the visual medium of theatre in order to critique the privileging of vision—the ocularcentrism that characterizes so much of Western cultural modernity—that locates the existential identity of the I in the power and visual consciousness of the eye. I am also writing a series of articles on Will Eno, a protégé of Edward (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) Albee, and the figure I find the most vital and fascinating American playwright to have emerged in this first decade of the new millennium. Using primarily a Lacanian approach, I have written so far on three of Eno’s plays, which explore the tragedy of speech—the fact that language grants us appearance as speaking subjects at the cost of the disappearance of our relationship to being; that language can articulate what we are without answering the question who we are. I am currently serving on twelve dissertation and thesis committees. I am directing a dissertation on representations of motherhood in twentieth-century drama, and another that examines the discourse of generations in contemporary fiction. I am also directing theses on Michel de Certeau and Gloria Anzaldua, and on “Veronica Mars” and the feminist appropriation of the film noir genre.

Based on excellence in teaching, research, and outreach, five Alumni Professorships are awarded each year to faculty members from across campus.  In 2005, Isabelle Thompson was honored with one of these Professorships.  Dr. Thompson, a professor of Technical and Professional Communication, is the coordinator of the English Center, which offers tutoring in reading and writing for students enrolled in world literature and composition. Although she has published articles in most of the journals related to technical and business communication, Dr. Thompson 's current research interests concern the effects of certain teaching strategies (referred to as scaffolding) on student learning in one-to-one tutorials. She has recently published two articles in the Writing Center Journal.

  I’m finishing a novel entitled MEMORIES OF EARTH, about an eighteen-year-old boy who disappears from his small Arizona town. The story, which is told from various points of view--a deputy sheriff, the boy's mother, the boy's brother's girlfriend--centers around the mystery of where he is, why he left, and who he is. 

My thesis students are working on short stories, and one of them is also working on a creative introduction about her writing process and how it is evolving. 

My field of interest is actually two intersecting fields: early American literature and Native American studies. My current research is on the material and intellectual practices of early American literacy--or more specifically, how Native Americans in the colonial and early national period acquired and adapted English language literacy to their own uses. I recently edited a critical anthology in which scholars from Native studies, history, English, and anthropology wrote brief essays to accompany primary texts produced by Native Americans from New England in the colonial period. Such texts range from a medicine bundle, basket, and a pictograph signature to more traditional written forms like letters, diaries, and petitions. The book I am currently working on is a study of the ways in which colonial schools and education impacted Native American communities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; I have individual chapters on the writings of Native American schoolmasters, letters and other documents by Native women students, and the ways in which one particular school, Moor's Charity school, dominated the discourse of Native education in the eighteenth century.

I have become very interested in collaborative writing projects, and I am currently working on two different essays with two different writing partners: one on archival research with Kris Bross, an early American colleague from Purdue University, and another which is a comparative view of Native literacy practices in New England's missionary societies and in the California missions with a colleague from UC-Riverside named Steve Hackel.

I have worked with a number of wonderful graduate students here at Auburn on projects ranging from a thesis on the politics of African American women's hair to theses on colonial womens' writing and even an archival study of a manuscript in the Montgomery State Archives. I am currently advising a number of doctoral students writing dissertations such as a study of eighteenth century Carribean plantations and the figure of the creole woman to a study of contemporary Native theory and strategies of self-representation as well as a project on the textual representation of transgressive motherhood in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Finally, I am one of three officers on the executive committee of my professional organization, the Society of Early Americanists. In this capacity I have helped organize two conferences and have been responsible for keeping track of membership for the roughly 500 early Americanists who are part of our society as well as for sending out our biannual newsletter.