Marian Aguiar
Associate Professor of English
Office: BH 145 L
Phone: (412) 268-3714
Email: aguiar@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
My fields of expertise include culture and globalization, postcolonial and transnational studies. I have a particular interest in the study of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. My research has focused on the question, "What does it mean to be modern?" My first book, Tracking Modernity: India, Trains, and the Culture of Mobility (University of Minnesota, 2011), explores cultural representations of modernity by considering how the railway was imagined in colonial, nationalist and postcolonial South Asian contexts.
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Diana Awad Scrocco
Associate Director of the Global Communication Center, Assistant Teaching Professor of English
Office: BH 259
Phone: (412) 268-2850
Email: dawad@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Rhetoric
Broadly, my research and teaching interests focus on professional discourse with an emphasis on experts’ feedback and novices’ responses; specifically, I study the rhetorical and interactional patterns in expert-novice communication as novices work toward developing professional expertise.
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Jane Bernstein
Professor of English
Office: BH 260 C
Phone: (412) 268-6445
Email: janebern@andrew.cmu.edu
Website: http://www.janebernstein.net/
Programs: Creative Writing, Professional Writing
When I joined the writing program here in 1991, I thought of myself as a fiction writer. In the years since then, I've found myself drawn to other genres. My new book, Rachel in the World, is a memoir, as were the two books that preceded it. I've published essays in such places as Ms. Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, The New York Times Magazine, Self, and Creative Nonfiction and written several scripts, among them the screenplay for Seven Minutes in Heaven, a Warner Brothers Film.
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Gerald Costanzo
Professor of English
Office: BH 233
Phone: (412) 268-2861
Email: gc3d@andrew.cmu.edu
Website: http://www.cmu.edu/universitypress/
Program: Creative Writing
Carnegie Mellon University Press, which I founded in 1975, publishes twenty books each year in the fields of poetry, short fiction, memoir, history, art history, education, and business. Perhaps the Press' most notable book has been Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, which in 1987 received The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
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Jim Daniels
Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English
Office: BH 260 B
Phone: (412) 268-2842
Email: jd6s@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Creative Writing
I have been teaching creative writing at Carnegie Mellon since 1981. My interests include poetry, fiction, and screenwriting. Recent books include Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry and From Milltown to Malltown (a collaboration with photographer Charlee Brodsky and writer Jane McCafferty). My fourth collection of short stories, Trigger Man, will be published in 2011.
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Sharon Dilworth
Associate Professor of English
Office: BH 260 F
Phone: (412) 268-6446
Email: sd20@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Creative Writing
As an artist in mid-career my creative work in fiction explores the tragedies and resonances of middle age. In my new work I have attempted to discern the timbre and qualities that have emerged in my own adult life by creating characters whose desires are circumscribed by the landscapes and pasts they can no longer escape. I think my latest writing is more resonant emotionally than my earlier work. It deals more with ambiguity and paradox and attempts to capture the sadness and grace notes of everyday life.
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Linda Flower
Professor of English
Office: BH 145 H
Phone: (412) 268-2863
Email: lf54@andrew.cmu.edu
Programs: Rhetoric, Professional Writing
I am drawn to rhetoric as an art of discovery and change, of inquiry and social action. My current work brings the emerging theories of deliberative democracy and the public sphere to the design of sites of intercultural inquiry, such as the community think tanks on educational and workplace issues, in which my students are involved.
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Yona Harvey
Assistant Teaching Professor of English
Office: BH 260 E
Phone: (412) 268-9156
Email: yharvey@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Creative Writing
My experiences in archives and information science, as a writer in the schools, and as a collaborator with other artists all inform my work as an emerging poet. Expanding the ways in which poetry is written and read interests me most.
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Terrance Hayes
Professor of English
Office: BH 260 G
Phone: (412) 268-9195
Email: thayes@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Creative Writing
The dimensions of culture remain at the center of my professional and personal goals, permeating not only the themes of my work, but my relationships with audiences, colleagues and students. At Carnegie Mellon University, I developed Out Poetry, a Readings in Poetry course exploring the intersections of poetry and the public sphere.
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Paul Hopper
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emeritus
Office: BH 245 K
Phone: (412) 268-7174
Email: hopper@andrew.cmu.edu
Website: http://home.eserver.org/hopper/default.html
Programs: Professional Writing, Rhetoric, Linguistics
My research and teaching have been centered on the connections between rhetoric (discourse) and grammar (linguistic structure). I am interested in working out the implications of an idea first broached by me in 1988, that structure is not immanent in a language but "emerges" through repetitions of favored word groupings in discourse.
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Suguru Ishizaki
Associate Professor of English
Office: BH 145 D
Phone: (412) 268-4103
Email: suguru@andrew.cmu.edu
Programs: Professional Writing, Rhetoric
My research focuses on developing tools for communication design. My work in the past several years has addressed problems and opportunities associated with the design of digital communication media. In my book, Improvisational Design: Continuous Responsive Digital Communication (MIT Press, 2003), I proposed a descriptive model of design—along with a series of computational experiments—that would allow designers to represent design solutions that are responsive to dynamic changes in the information recipient's intention, in the situation, and in the information.
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Barbara Johnstone
Professor of English
Office: BH 245 H
Phone: (412) 268-6447
Email: bj4@andrew.cmu.edu
Website: http://works.bepress.com/barbara_johnstone/
Programs: Rhetoric, Professional Writing, Linguistics
My work is in an area that might be called "discourse studies," at the intersection of rhetoric, linguistics, and critical theory. I have worked on persuasive styles and strategies in the Middle East, on narrative in the American heartland, on the forms and functions of repetition in language, and on the role of the individual in language and linguistics.
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David S. Kaufer
Professor of English
Office: BH 145 F
Phone: (412) 268-1074
Email: kaufer@andrew.cmu.edu
Programs: Rhetoric, Professional Writing
I am a professor of rhetoric with interests in the qualitative and quantitative analysis of rhetoric, writing and written information, and technologies for text analysis and text collaboration. Between 1994 and 2009, I was Head of English at Carnegie Mellon. I was a co-founder of a well-reputed and ongoing interdisciplinary MDES (Master of Communication Planning and Information Design) program that is co-administered by the School of Design (in the College of Fine Arts) and the Department of English (in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences) at Carnegie Mellon.
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Alan Kennedy
Professor of English
Office: BH 145 K
Phone: (412) 268-7175
Email: ak2w@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
My primary academic interest is in the study of the art of literature. I maintain an interest in a wide range of literature. In particular I'm interested in the issue of how literature 'communicates' and to that end, continue to work on trying to understand what could be known as 'the rhetoric of literature', with particular attention to fiction as a focus for my writing.
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Jon Klancher
Associate Professor of English, Director of Literary and Cultural Studies Program
Office: BH 245 F
Phone: (412) 268-2852
Email: jk2@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
My research has focused on the British Romantic and Victorian periods, print history, and the sociology of culture. I am especially interested in the emergence of new fields of knowledge in the early nineteenth century and have recently completed a book on this topic, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013). I am also working on the historical relationship of so-called "new" and "old" media in a project on book history, the long nineteenth century, and the current debates around new media and digital humanities. I have edited A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age for Blackwell and contributed to a wide range of collections and reference books. I am also author of The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790-1832 and related essays on Romantic-age cultural and media history.
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Peggy Knapp
Professor of English
Office: BH 145 J
Phone: (412) 268-6453
Email: pk07@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
I am especially interested in what can be discovered about imaginative and argumentative texts from medieval and early modern England through the use of literary and aesthetic theory. I founded and for many years edited an annual book series called Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, an international forum for the discussion of those questions.
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Hilary Masters
Professor of English
Office: BH 260 A
Phone: (412) 268-6443
Email: hm05@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Creative Writing
My working experience as a journalist, a Broadway Press agent and even some history in politics have all found a place and nurtured my writing. My work sounds themes of abandonment—the different kinds of abandonment, physical, spiritual and moral while I try to represent men and women in contemporary America.
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Jane McCafferty
Associate Professor of English
Office: BH 245 N
Phone: (412) 268-7177
Email: janem@andrew.cmu.edu
Programs: Creative Writing, Professional Writing
I teach a variety of fiction and non-fiction courses. My favorite of these is Literary Journalism; I'm always awed by what many students are able to produce in this genre. I like to watch students learn to tell stories that expand their vision of their own communities, and their own lives. Our students usually end up teaching me more than I can teach them.
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Chris Neuwirth
Department Head, English; Professor of English and Human Computer Interaction
Office: BH 259
Phone: (412) 268-8702
Email: cmn@cmu.edu
Programs: Professional Writing, Rhetoric
My research activities have focused on developing theory- and research-based computer tools for reading and writing, as well as conducting empirical research that explores the effects of those tools.
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Kathy M. Newman
Associate Professor of English
Office: BH 145 N
Phone: (412) 268-6450
Email: kn4@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
My primary interest is in the relationship between "mass culture" and the "masses"—the dialectical relationship between our institutions of television, film, radio, and print culture and our social/political formations (Raymond Williams).
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John Oddo
Assistant Professor of English
Office: BH 245 R
Email: joddo@andrew.cmu.edu
Programs: Rhetoric, Professional Writing
My research draws on theories of rhetoric, discourse, and multimodality to critically examine how powerful agents use language (and other symbols) to generate support for war. The focal point of my research is "intertextual rhetoric"—that is, rhetoric that operates across texts and across time. In past publications, I have examined how different U.S. presidents have rearticulated generic rhetorical strategies to manipulate the public and draw the country into hostilities.
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Richard Purcell
Assistant Professor of English
Office: BH 145 C
Phone: (412) 268-2614
Email: rpurcell@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
My primary field of study is late nineteenth, twentieth century and twenty-first century American literature and literary criticism. I have secondary interests in African-American literature, Film Studies and Cold War Studies. You can find some of my work in Critical Quarterly or on the radio as a commentator for National Public Radio. I have also worked in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Board of Education to develop a course on African-American literature for high school seniors.
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Andreea Deciu Ritivoi
Associate Professor of English, Director of Rhetoric Program
Office: BH 245 D
Phone: (412) 268-6221
Email: aritivoi@andrew.cmu.edu
Programs: Rhetoric, Professional Writing
My research interests include rhetorical theory and Continental philosophy, narrative and identity, exile and transnationalism, Eastern European societies, and controversy.
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Karen Schnakenberg
Teaching Professor (Emeritus) of English
Email: krs@cmu.edu
My interests lie at the intersections of course and curriculum design, professional and technical writing, the history of writing instruction in higher education, pedagogy, and the teaching of writing. In research I have a long-standing interest in methods for communicating specialized information to non-expert audiences, particularly in situations where the non-expert needs to use the information to make decisions or to inform action.
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David R. Shumway
Professor of English
Office: BH 245 J
Phone: (412) 268-7176
Email: shumway@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
I research and teach in American culture and cultural theory. My special interests in American culture include film, popular music, and late nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. My theoretical interests concern the historical and institutional production of knowledge, cultural politics, and theories of identity.
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Kristina Straub
Professor of English
Office: BH 145 B
Phone: (412) 268-6458
Email: ks3t@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
My interests are in feminist cultural studies, sexuality studies, and eighteenth-century British cultural studies. My first book, Divided Fictions, was among a handful of feminist reconsiderations of the novelist Frances Burney that helped to change the assessment of that writer during the 1980s. SexualSuspects, a book about actors and ideologies of sexuality in eighteenth-century Britain, helped to direct theater and feminist studies of the early modern period toward a now-burgeoning interest in performance and its cultural contexts, particularly how sexuality is imagined in popular culture.
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Christopher Warren
Assistant Professor of English
Office: BH 245 M
Email: cnwarren@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
I specialize in Renaissance literature as it relates to questions of politics, law, international political thought, and intellectual history.
My current book project investigates Renaissance literature’s complex and often-neglected contributions to the history of international law by reading Renaissance poets including Shakespeare, Donne, Grotius, and Milton in the dual contexts of literary history and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century formation of international law.
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Necia Werner
Assistant Teaching Professor of English, Director of Undergraduate Professional and Technical Writing
Office: BH 245L
Phone: (412) 268-2659
Email: nkw@cmu.edu
My interests lie at the intersection of professional and technical writing, the rhetoric of science and technology, and communicating expert knowledge to non-expert audiences. My research includes work on the rhetoric of peer review at scientific journals, the ways in which editors' methods for peer review have been shaped over time by a variety of rhetorical exigencies, and how editors communicate their expectations to authors and reviewers.
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Danielle Zawodny Wetzel
Associate Teaching Professor & Director of First-Year Writing
Office: BH 259
Phone: (412) 268-4468
Email: dfz@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Rhetoric
I’m interested in all things related to the teaching and assessment of reading and writing—especially at the intersection of rhetoric, applied linguistics, and composition.
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Jeffrey Williams
Professor of English
Office: BH 245 P
Phone: (412) 268-1977
Email: jwill@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Literary and Cultural Studies
What is criticism for? What does it mean to be a cultural critic? I've tried to answer that question in a range of essays, such as "The Posttheory Generation" and "The New Belletrism," as well as in a series of interviews, some of which are collected in Critics at Work: Interviews 1993-2003 (NYU, 2004). One aim of criticism that I think is especially important is to look at the state of higher education, and I have focused particularly on student debt, for instance in "Debt Education" and "Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture," both in Dissent.
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Joanna Wolfe
Director of the Global Communication Center, Teaching Professor of English
Office: BH 259
Phone: (412) 268-2850
Email: jowolfe@andrew.cmu.edu
Program: Rhetoric
My research centers on writing pedagogy and communication styles, with a particular interest in gender and communication in technical settings. I am joining CMU to start up the new Global Communication Center, where I hope to experiment with new methods for improving communication instruction across the university.
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James Wynn
Associate Professor of English
Office: BH 145 M
Phone: (412) 268-9765
Email: jwynn@andrew.cmu.edu
Programs: Professional Writing, Rhetoric
James Wynn has published articles on rhetoric, mathematics, and science in Rhetorica, Written Communication, and 19th Century Prose. His recent interests have been in rhetoric, science, mathematics and public policy with a focus on nuclear power. He is a founder and current director of the Pittsburgh Consortium for Rhetoric and Discourse Studies.
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