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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.

Dr. Robin DeRosa

As an undergraduate at Brown University, I had a double major in English and Women’s Studies, and that started me thinking about interdisciplinarity and common currents that run through both literary criticism and broader cultural analysis. I took a couple of years off from school after graduating (to live in my car for a while and then to teach high school, both of which were challenging), and then went on to Tufts University to pursue my Ph.D. At Tufts, I experimented a lot: with early modern British drama and with modern American poetry and then with early American literature. But the thread that ties all of my work together is an interest in critical theory and methodology: feminism, poststructuralism and cultural studies in particular. The brief essay (PDF 96 Kb) posted here is a conference paper that I presented at the 2004 Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia. It captures some of what my dissertation project focused on: the relationships among colonial American history, performance theory and contemporary tourism. I try to encourage my students to think outside the box, and not let disciplinary boundaries or conventional definitions of “English” as a field limit the kinds of projects they might want to pursue. If you’re interested in this essay and you would like the accompanying bibliography, or if you’d like to talk about my work or your own, fee free to e-mail me anytime at rderosa@plymouth.edu .