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Faculty Showcase

Joseph Monninger

Two Ton: One Fight, One Night, Tony Galento vs. Joe Louis (PDF 156 Kb, excerpted) took three years to research and write. I traveled to Orange, New Jersey and talked to old guys who sparred with Tony Galento. I also tracked down some of his relatives and interviewed them. Then I read. I read boxing columns from the Star Ledger in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and spent more time than I care to admit in the Dartmouth Library scanning the New York Times. Eventually I decided this book had to be about voice. Although it may sound strange, I also had to decide what the book was about. Sure, it was a book about a fight, but so what? What was worth telling about that night? I’ll leave it to readers to decide if I found the correct voice or hit on what mattered in that moment.

Dr. Ann McClellan

As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, it took me a while to finally come to terms with my English major. But once I read Virginia Woolf and the modernists, I was hooked. I went to England as a junior to research my honor's thesis at Oxford University for a month and I've been going back ever since. In graduate school at the University of Cincinnati, I continued my focus on 20th century British literature, but I was also engaged with literary theory and women's studies, which resulted in a graduate certificate in Women's Studies in addition to my Ph.D.

While most of the scholarly work in my current book project on representations of women intellectuals relies on psychoanalytic object-relations, feminism, and cultural studies, the following article (PDF 159 Kb) published in Etudes Irlandaises (spring 2006), combines post-colonial and narrative theory to analyze how the main character of Edith Somerville and Martin Ross's 1890s Irish novel, The Real Charlotte , uses class and regional dialects as ways to exert power and control over other characters in the novel. It captures what I try to teach my students about the essence of literary theory: its inter-connectedness. If you're interested in the article, have questions, or would like to talk about English studies at Plymouth State, feel free to email me at akmcclellan@plymouth.edu.