Faculty
Danielle Allen
Professor, Department. Classical Languages & Literatures, Committee on Social Thought, and the College
Greek literature of the classical period; social, cultural, and political history of Athens; political philosophy, ancient and modern; history of rhetoric; philosophy of punishment; democratic theory and history of democracies; American political and legal history; 20th c. American poetry.
Ralph Austen
Professor of African History
African literature.
Kelly Austin
Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and the College
Her interests include poetry in the Americas and Translation Studies.  She is currently writing on Pablo Neruda's translations of Walt Whitman and North American translations of Neruda.  She is also a translator.
Robert Bird
Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the College
Robert Bird works mainly in Russian modernist literature and philosophical aesthetics, with particular interests in the poet-thinker Viacheslav Ivanov, the theologian Pavel Florensky, and the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. He is particularly concerned with the ways in which aesthetic expressions attain meaning and exert influence in non-aesthetic realms, including politics and religion
Suzanne Buffam
Lecturer, Creative Writing
Suzanne Buffam is the author of Past Imperfect (a collection of poems published in 2005 by House of Anansi in Toronto) and Interiors (a chapbook published in 2006 by Delirium Press in Montreal). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, her poems have appeared in various journals, including Boston Review, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, and A Public Space, as well as the anthologies Language Matters (Oxford University Press) and The City Visible (Cracked Slab).

James Chandler
Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities, Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Professor of English
Bradin Cormack
Associate Professor of English and Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University. He specializes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, with a focus on poetry and drama as they relate to legal culture. He is author of A Power To Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625, from the University of Chicago Press. He is at present working on two projects: a short book on Shakespeare and Law; and a study of Shakespeare's sonnets, under the title Form Shadow Form: Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Making of Meaning.

Garin Cycholl
Lecturer, Creative Writing
Garin Cycholl’s writing explores the geographies introduced by writers Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, Sterling Plumpp, and Tom McGrath.  In these territories, his work examines American poetry’s connection to historical memory and place.  He is author of Blue Mound to 161, a poetic journey of the social and geological dislocations of southern Illinois, as well as Rafetown Georgics (shorter poems) and the prose collection Nightbirds.
Wendy Doniger
Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Committees on Social Thought and on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College
Though she has published a selection of her limericks ("Limericks on the Study of Religion," in The Incarnate Imagination: Essays in Theology, The Arts and Social Sciences in Honor of Andrew Greeley), Wendy Doniger's interest in poetry is primarily as a translator from the Sanskrit. She has translated a portion of the oldest Sanskrit collection in any language, The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit as well as The Laws of Manu and The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana. The meter of the Rig Veda is extremely complex, that of the Laws of Manu (the shloka meter) more or less the equivalent of English blank verse, and the Kamasutra is primarily prose, with a significant change of voice in the poetry (also in shloka) that ends each chapter. In none of these has she attempted anything like rhyme (which is, in any case, not a feature of the Sanskrit poetry in question), but she has paid attention to meter, and always she has attempted to capture something of the power of the poetry in each case: the intensity of the Veda, the rich detail of Manu, and the incredible compression of thought in the Kamasutra. At present she is translating two plays by Harsha, which contain a great deal of verse (in various meters), and the final books of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata (in shlokas).
Elizabeth Helsinger
Department of English Language and Literature, John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English, Art History, and the College
Elizabeth Helsinger has long been fascinated with the interplay between literature and the visual and material arts. Her early work focused on art criticism (Ruskin) and on the role of poets, particularly Baudelaire, Rossetti, and Yeats in articulating aesthetic and poetic ideas in their criticism and embodying it in their poetry. “Reading” became a central term, as she studied how these poet- and writer-critics borrow from and in turn shape techniques of looking and of more literary reading and interpretation. She has also worked extensively on landscape as an especially interesting aspect of the shared literary and visual culture of the first half of the nineteenth century - and as the site of competing, often highly politicized constructions of “Englishness” - with particular attention to poetry of Tennyson, Clare, and Emily Bronte. Her current research and writing focuses on the Pre-Raphaelite poet-artists, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as a way of reconsidering questions of history, poetics, and the emerging material cultures of later nineteenth century Britain. Her teaching, however, ranges more widely across genres and periods. She takes for domain of inquiry the “long nineteenth century,” from c. 1770 to 1910. Victorian poetry and poetics, fiction, and non-fiction prose and Victorian painting, illustrated books, and other arts of design are central topics, but often starting in the late eighteenth century or reaching into the early twentieth.
Oren Izenberg
Assistant Professor, English and the College
Though interested in the long history of lyric poetry, Oren Izenberg's current emphases in teaching and research are on 20th century poetry and poetics and on intersections between poetry and philosophy. He is currently working on two books: the first (Being Numerous: The Poetic Imagination of the Ground of Social Life) describes ways in which poets in the 20th century respond to a century of crisis and rethink, by means of their art, the question of what counts as a person. The second (Poetry and the Philosophy of Mind), proposes that the object the mind makes—principally, the lyric poem— might be better understood by giving some attention to our best recent accounts of how the mind itself is made. He places poems alongside recent work in (analytic) philosophy, considering them variously as examples, dramatizations of, and experiments in the mind’s workings.
Alison James
Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures and the College
Alison James focuses on modern and contemporary French literature. Her research and teaching interests include the Oulipo group, experimental writing, the connections between literature and philosophy, and the relationship between literature and the other arts. Recent and forthcoming articles study Jacques Roubaud's autobiographical writing, the problem of authorial intention in Oulipian texts, and the question of literary formalism. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the formal and thematic functions of chance in the works of Georges Perec.
Deborah Nelson
Associate Professor of English, the Humanities, and the Center for Gender Studies
Martha Nussbaum
Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics
Martha Nussbaum is interested in the relationship between literature and the ethical and political imagination. Her work on these issues began with ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy, and she still regularly teaches courses in those areas, sometimes in the original languages. She also teaches courses that investigate the literature/ethics relationship using modern literature. Henry James and Proust are particular favorites.
Liesl Olson
Harper Schmidt Fellow, and Assistant Professor in the College, Humanities Division
Liesl Olson received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004. Her research interests include twentieth-century British and American literature, modern and contemporary poetry, Irish studies, and the visual arts. Her book, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2008), addresses literary modernism's preoccupation with the habitual and unselfconscious actions of everyday life. Looking primarily at the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Marcel Proust, Modernism and the Ordinary argues that a commitment to representing and valorizing ordinariness undercuts and threatens the very nature of modernism, as each of these writers is attracted to the ordinary in a way that tempers the very artfulness of their literary works. Liesl has also published essays on the work of Henry James, W.H. Auden, and the contemporary poet Robert Hass.
Mark Payne
Assistant Professor of Classical Languages and Literature
Mark Payne began to take a serious interest in poetry as a high school student in England reading Baudelaire and Mallarmé. After an undergraduate degree in English Literature he went on to a write an MA thesis in 1990 on the American poets Susan Howe, Gustaf Sobin and Clark Coolidge. He moved to the US in 1993, living in San Francisco and New York, and publishing his own poetry in various small magazines like Talisman, Hambone, Object Permanence, and Shearsman. In 1997 he returned to academia, completing a PhD in Classics at Columbia University in 2003. He has published a book, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge, 2007), and several articles on Greek poetry and its reception. He is now working on a book about animals in poetry. His teaching at the University of Chicago includes classes on archaic and Hellenistic Greek poetry in the Classics department, and courses on epic from Homer to Milton in the Greek Thought and Literature program.
Tahera Qutbuddin
Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature, Dept of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Tahera Qutbuddin’s reseach focuses on intersections of the literary, the religious, and the political in classical Arabic poetry (and prose). She has written a book titled Al-Mu’ayyad al-Shirazi and Fatimid Da’wa Poetry: A Case of Commitment in Classical Arabic Literature (Brill, 2005); she argues that this eleventh century poet—who was also a missionary, an author of voluminous esoteric works, an educator, and a chancery official—broke away from the panegyric conventions of his time to found the dynamic religio-political tradition of “Fatimid da’wa (mission) poetry”, that flourished after him for a thousand years through the succeeding Tayyibi da’wa, and continues to thrive today. Qutbuddin’s teaching (including courses reading texts in the original Arabic and others in translation) has included topics in classical Arabic poetry and poetics based on chronological periods (Abbasid Poetry; Pre Islamic Poetry), individual poets (Mutanabbi), and critical approaches (Classical Arabic Poetics).

Srikanth Reddy
Assistant Professor of English and the College
Srikanth Reddy's first collection of poetry is Facts for Visitors (University of California Press). His poems have appeared in various journals, including APR, Grand Street, Fence, and Ploughshares, and his critical writing has been featured in publications such as The New Republic, The Chicago Tribune, and American Literature. He has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation (in the Humanities) and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and doctoral candidate at Harvard University, Reddy was the William Vaughan Moody Writer-in-Residence at the University of Chicago prior to being appointed Assistant Professor in English and the College.
Valerie Ritter
Assistant Professor, South Asian Languages & Civilizations
Valerie Ritter has written a book manuscript (under review) on a manuscript on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Hindi poetry and poetics, and the post-colonial interpretations of these works. She also has interests in twentieth-century lyric; court patronage and poetry in print; and the classical taxonomy-of-heroines genre in the literary dialect, Braj Bhasha. She teaches courses on South Asian literature in English translation, and advanced Hindi.

Jennifer Scappettone
Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing and the College
Jennifer Scappettone's research and teaching interests include 19th-century through contemporary writing; the history of the avant-garde; geographies of modernity and present transmogrifications of place; literatures of travel and displacement; barbarism, anachronism, and polylingualism; translation; relations between literary and other arts; and art history, visual culture, and aesthetics. She is presently working on a book, Venice and the Digressive Invention of the Modern, that studies an alternative geographical prism for modernism--the fallen lagoon Republic of Venice--and the prose and poetics that it enabled (by Ruskin, Henry James, Pound, Marinetti, and contemporary artists). Her first book of poems, From Dame Quickly, is forthcoming in 2008 from Litmus Press; her second, a cross-genre work titled Exit 43, is in progress, commissioned by Atelos Press. Two chapbooks were printed in 2007: Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (dusi/ekollectiv) and Err-Residence (Bronze Skull); Abluvion Almanac[k], a chapbook of visual stills, is coming soon from Outside Voices. Her translations from the Italian poetry of Amelia Rosselli are being collected as a book entitled Locomotrix, and she is guest-editing the 2008 issue of Aufgabe, with a focus emergent Italian poetics. Poetry, prose, and translations appear in venues such as The Best American Poetry 2004, War and Peace, Zoland Annual, and a number of journals; a sound file is posted at PennSound, and "lastmaker lenses" produced in conjunction with Goat Island Performance Collective are archived at thelastperformance.org.

Joshua Scodel
Professor & Chair, Comparative Literature; Professor of English, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, and the College; Editor, Modern Philology
Joshua Scodel's major field of research is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary history and its relation to intellectual, cultural, and political history. Special interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry's engagements with classical and Renaissance continental poetic traditions; Renaissance genre theory and practice; the history of literary criticism in relation to literary practice, ancient to modern; and early modern literature's responses to ancient philosophical thought. He has also worked on eighteenth-century poetry and is an enthusiastic reader of twentieth-century and contemporary verse.
Clinton Seely
Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Clinton Seely works on Bangla (a.k.a. Bengali) literature, particularly that of the 19th and 20th centuries. With poet Leonard Nathan, he published Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair: Selected Poems to the Mother Goddess, originals by the eighteenth-century poet-devotee Ramprasad Sen. His A Poet Apart: A Literary Biography of the Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) concerns the life and writings of the most admired Bengali poet since Rabindranath Tagore. His translation of an epic poem in nine cantos by Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-73), considered the first work of the modern era, was published in 2004 under the title The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal.He has taught a course on Jibanananda's poetry. In the fall, 2005, he offers again his course on Datta's poetry and plays entitled "Literature of Bengal: M. M. Dutt and Nineteenth-Century Bengali Identity."
Bozena Shallcross
Associate Professor of Polish Literature
In her recent publications, Bozena Shallcross has focused on the prominent Polish contemporary poets Zbigniew Herbert, Wislawa Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, as well as the Russian poet Josif Brodsky. She has also written on earlier modernist Polish poetry, in particular, the lyric poetry of Leopold Staff as well as the poetic works of the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. She approaches poetry from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, usually exploring the interrelationship between the visual arts and the poetic word and imagery. So far, she has taught at the University of Chicago two courses on poetry ("Postwar Polish Poetry" and "Reading the Arch-Text: Adam Mickiewicz's "Pan Tadeusz") and several courses related to this genre.

Mary Margaret Sloan
Lecturer, Creative Writing
Mary Margaret Sloan is the author of two books of poetry, The Said Lands, Islands, and Premises (Chax Press, 1995), and Infiltration (Queriendo Press, 1989). She edited the anthology, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman House, 1998), which surveys poetry as well as trans-genre and multi-media works from the nineteen sixties to the mid nineteen nineties. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and has been anthologized in Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Talisman House, 1996) and the Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets (Potes & Poets Press, 1994). Recent work can be seen at the online journals Fascicle and Titanic Operas. Essays have appeared in A Grand Permission, edited by Brenda Hillman, (Wesleyan 2003) and The World in Time and Place: Toward a History of Innovative American Poetry (Talisman, 2002). She serves on the board of The Chicago Poetry Project and curated the CPP’s 2006/2007 reading series.
Nita Stahl
Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature, Department of Comparative Literature.
Neta Stahl received her Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University, a leading graduate program in the study of Modern Hebrew Literature (particularly, in the use of semiotics and formalist theory in the study of Hebrew Literature). Before coming to Chicago she taught Hebrew Literature and Language at Yale University. Stahl’s 2005 dissertation – “The Homecoming of the Other:Representation of Jesus in Twentieth Century Hebrew Literature” won the prestigious Koret publication prize forfirst book in Jewish Studies, and is forthcoming in Hebrew (December 2007. An expanded English edition of the same book
is in preparation). In this book Stahl follows both a thematic and an historical path in charting the transformations of the figure of Jesus in Modern Hebrew poetry, prose and drama, and argues that the significant changes in the attitude toward Jesus in modern Hebrew writing reflect the transformations of Jewish and Israeli self-perception. Her next book project: "Back To - and From - History: Narrative and Conceptions ofTime in Modern Jewish Writing" - will examine the literary
tools that Modern Jewish writers employ in order to bring the Jewish self "back to history", against the background of classical Hebrew texts, (Biblical, Talmudic and Rabbinic), which had little, if any, interest in linear, realistic modes of representation and chronological descriptions of events. Apart from these two wide and panoramic projects, Stahl also studied the Hebrew Expressionism of Uri Zvi Greenberg, the poetry of exile of Avot Yeshurun and the prose-poetry style in the works of Yoel Hoffmann. She is currently working on the translation of the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg with the intention of publishing the first complete volume of translation of this
towering figure of Modern Hebrew poetry who is hardly recognized in the US.
Lina Steiner
Assistant Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures and the College
Lina Steiner received her original training in Russia, where the traditions of the Formalists and the Tartu school of semiotics are still vital, and the study of poetry and historical poetics is crucial to the liberal arts education. After completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale, she has published articles on Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Herzen, and Yurii Lotman.  She is especially interested in the relationship between poetry and prose in the nineteenth century. The influence of Romantic poetry on the novel --or what Bakhtin called “novelization”-- is one of the central concerns of her current book project on the rise on the Russian realist novel. In one of her recently completed articles she links Tchaikovsky’s innovative lyric operas Eugene Onegin and Mazeppa to the genre of Romantic poema, which developed in Russia in the 1820’s and 30’s through productive inheritance of Byron and English Romanticism.        
Richard Strier
Professor of English and of the Humanities and Frank C. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor of Civilizations in the College
16th- and 17th-Century Poetry; 17th-Century Prose; Shakespeare; General Problems in Poetry and Poetics; 20th-Century Poetry and Criticism.
Robert von Hallberg
Helen A. Regenstein Professor, English, Comp. Literature, and Germanic Studies, and the College
Robert von Hallberg is particularly interested in poetry written in English and in German since about 1900. He writes extensively on U.S. poetry since 1945, and teaches courses—some comparative—throughout the 20th century. He is now at work on a literary critical study of African American poetry, and on a short book on lyric poetry in general. He has written three books—Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (1978); American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980 (1985); Poets, Politics, Intellectuals (1996) [in vol. 8 of the Cambridge History of American Literature]—and edited three others—Canons (1984); Politics and Poetic Value (1987); Literary Intellectuals and the Dissolution of the State (1996). His approach to poetry is formal, or stylistic, and historical, where that term refers principally to political history.
David Wray
Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature
David Wray's interests include: Roman and Hellenistic poetry; ancient and early modern verse drama; the relations between ethical philosophy and poetic theory; and literary translation. His publications include Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge 2001) and essays on Tibullus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Statius, and Louis Zukofsky. His poetic translations have appeared in Chicago Review and Near South.
Adam Zagajewski
Adam Zagajewski lives in Krakow and Chicago. His collections in English translation include Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991), Mysticism for Beginners (1997), Another Beauty (2000), and the anthology Without End (2002). Among his books of essays are Solidarity, Solitude (1986, tr. 1989) and Two Cities (1991, tr. 1995). Zagajewski has also edited Polish Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2007). His most recent collection of poems, Eternal Enemies, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Alison James