Courses and Faculty

John Ernest has been identified as our most knowledgeable scholar of 19th-century African American literature, a judgment confirmed by the essays he has published in PMLA, American Literary History, and American Literature, among other journals, by the modern editions he has published of classic texts by William Wells Brown and William and Ellen Craft, and particularly by his books Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature and Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History. His most recent books are Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History and A Nation Within a Nation: Organizing African American Communities before the Civil War. He is the editor of Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. John Ernest holds a PhD from the University of Virginia and taught at Florida International University, the University of New Hampshire, and West Virginia University, before taking up his current post as Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Delaware.

Kathryn Freeman is a scholar of British Romanticism, Orientalism, Blake studies, and women’s literature. Her books include Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas (SUNY 1997) and Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785-1835: Re-Orienting Anglo-India (Ashgate 2014). She has published articles on Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary; Phebe Gibbes’ Hartly House, Calcutta; and the translations of Williams Jones and Charles Wilkins. Her Guide to William Blake is a companion to Blake’s cosmology and historical context (Routledge 2017). Her current book project examines the literary relationship among Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley through the lens of androgyny, subjectivity, and the re-creative. She is also working on an edition of Phebe Gibbes’s 1786 novel, Zoriada, or Village Annals. Freeman received her PhD from Yale in 1990. She taught at Sewanee before moving to the University of Miami, where she is now Professor of English.

John Gatta is William B. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of the South. His research and extensive writing—including five books and more than fifty articles—mainly concerns American literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the intersections of literature, religion, and the environment. His first book, a critical study of the New England poet Edward Taylor, won the 1989 Academic Book-of-the-Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and his second, American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture, was named an “outstanding academic book” for 1998 by editors of Choice. His third critical volume, like his second and fifth also from Oxford University Press, is Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. A graduate of Notre Dame, with a PhD from Cornell, Gatta has served as Chair of the English Department at the University of Connecticut, where he taught for many years before coming to Sewanee. He is currently Interim Director of the School of Letters, and he has previously served as Dean of the College.

John Grammer, Professor of English at the University of the South, teaches classes in British and American literature, American Studies, and Sewanee’s interdisciplinary Humanities Program. He received his BA at Vanderbilt University and his PhD at the University of Virginia. His 1996 book Pastoral and Politics in the Old South won the C. Hugh Holman Award as the best book of the year in Southern literary study. His essays and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, Oxford American, Southern Literary Journal, Sewanee Review and other journals, and in such books as The Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and Blackwell’s Guide to the Literature and Culture of the American South.

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a translator, poet, and teacher who has lived and worked in Iraq for the last six years. She served as the founding chair of the English Department at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She received her MFA at Warren Wilson and MEd from the University of Virginia. Handful of Salt (The Word Works, 2016) introduced Kajal Ahmad’s poetry to English. The Dictionary of Midnight: Selected Poems of Abdulla Pashew is forthcoming from Phoneme Media in 2018. Poems, translations, and essays have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Epiphany, Iowa Review, Words Without Borders, and the Poetry Society of America. She is currently co-director at AUIS’ Kashkul and a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Kurdish Studies.

A member of the Sewanee English department since 2013, Ross studies and teaches sixteenth and seventeenth-century British writers, especially Milton, Jonson, and Spenser. His essays and reviews have appeared in Studies in Philology, Spenser Studies, Christianity and Literature, and most recently in Forms of Faith: Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2017). Ross was educated at Harvard and holds a Ph.D. from Yale University. He also taught high school and at Connecticut College before coming to the University of the South.

Pamela Royston Macfie is Professor of English at Sewanee, where she holds the Samuel R. Williamson Distinguished University Chair and teaches courses on Dante, Shakespeare, and Renaissance poetry. She has led the college’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Program and has served as chair of the English Department. A graduate of Goucher College, she received her MA and PhD degrees from Duke, where she was a Medieval and Renaissance Studies Fellow. Her published scholarship has covered Shakespeare, Spenser, Chapman, Marlowe and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets and focuses particularly on Renaissance appropriations of Ovid. These days she is preoccupied with a book-length project entitled “Summoning the Past: Hero and Leander’s Poetry of Allusion.” Her longstanding interest in Dante led her to Dartmouth’s Dante Seminar, where her participation was supported by the National Endowment of Humanities. Macfie has also served as a Wye Faculty Fellow at the Aspen Institute and as a tutor to British Studies at Oxford, a summer program operated jointly by Sewanee and Rhodes College.

Kelly Malone is a Professor of English at Sewanee, and former Chair of the Department of English. She holds a BA from Providence College and an MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to teaching upper-level classes on Shakespeare and eighteenth-century British literature, she regularly teaches as part of the Early Modern team in Sewanee’s interdisciplinary Humanities program. With Elizabeth Mansfield, she co-edited Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century, published by the Voltaire Foundation of the Oxford University Press in 2013. She is a reviewer for The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. Her research and writing focus on the literary and cultural history of Restoration and Augustan England.

Mark Rasmussen is Charles J. Luellen Professor of English at Centre College, where he has been teaching courses on Medieval and Renaissance literature since 1989. His recent publications include “Shakespeare and the Critics: Rhetoric, Form, Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (2016), as well as a critical introduction, “Jill Mann’s Patience,” to Life in Words (2014), the collected essays of the distinguished medievalist Jill Mann, a volume that he edited. Rasmussen’s other edited collection, Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (2002), has had a lasting impact within its field, renewing attention to questions of form in English Renaissance literature. A graduate of Harvard, Rasmussen received his PhD at Johns Hopkins, where he also taught before taking up his post at Centre. There he has received the Kirk Award for Teaching Excellence among many other honors. At the School of Letters he has offered courses on Chaucer, on the Arthurian legend, and on literary criticism and theory.

Lauryl Tucker is Associate Professor of English at the University of the South, where she teaches classes on modern literature. Her scholarly interests range from Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot to C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers; her essays have appeared in such journals as Literature Interpretation Theory, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Sewanee Theological Review. At present she is hard at work on a book about humor and gender in the work of such poets as Louise Bennett, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy. A graduate of Sewanee, Lauryl Tucker earned her MA and PhD at the University of Virginia.