Quick Navigation

Open book

English Department Faculty by Area of Specialization: Later American Literature


Later American Literature at NIU

At NIU, graduate study of American literature since the Civil War delves far, wide, and deep into the literary and cultural diversity of the United States. Through a range of courses both traditional and innovative, our students enter continuing debates on the meaning of American Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism; they pursue the multiple connections between literary art, history, and society; and they examine the dynamic relationships between cultural centers and margins right up to the present.

These explorations are guided by dedicated faculty who are also leading researchers in 19th, 20th, and 21st century American Literature.


Conversations on Race and Ethnicity

Central to the department’s strength in this period is the faculty’s research into American conflicts and conversations about race and ethnicity. Dr. Tim Ryan’s Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind (Louisiana State University Press, 2008) was the winner of the Landry Award for its contribution to Southern Studies. The book analyzes how twentieth-century African American authors writing about pre-Civil War slavery responded in very specific ways to each other’s works and to those of white writers, to fiction and to nonfiction.

Dr. Deborah De Rosa’s scholarship is centered on race relations in the nineteenth century, and has published Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature: 1830-1865 (State University of New York Press, 2003), as well as an anthology of this literature, Into the Mouths of Babes (Greenwood Press, 2005). Her current research includes writing on Amy Tan as well Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Dr. Ibis Gomez-Vega has published widely on ethnic American literature, including essays on Arab American, Asian American, Native American, Caribbean, Latina and Latino authors. Her work on contemporary writers including Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Thomas King, Diana Abu-Jaber, Naomi Shihab Nye, Anne Tyler, and Neil Simon, has appeared in journals such as Critica Hispánica, South Atlantic Review, and American Drama. Gomez-Vega teaches not only courses following traditional genre and period categories, but also off-the-grid topics courses such as Women’s Spirituality in American Literature, Literature of Living White Male Writers, and American Literature since September 11.


Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics

Another area of strength among NIU’s Later Americanist faculty involves interdisciplinary research into the relations between literary production, popular culture, politics and society. Dr. Mark Van Wienen’s recent work considers the connections between literature and progressive social change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exemplified in his book American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois (University of Michigan Press, 2012).

Dr. Joe Bonomo has published three books on American popular culture with Continuum Press: AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (2010), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found (2009/2011; translated into French, 2013), and Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band (2007; translated into French, 2012). He is also the editor of Conversations with Greil Marcus (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), one of the most highly influential of commentators on American popular culture.

Further, Dr. Ryan’s current research examines relations between high and folk culture, literature and music, as his book in progress, Yoknapatawpha Blues, explores parallels between the music of Mississippi blues recording artists and the fiction of William Faulkner.


Genre Studies: Fiction, Drama, Poetry, Creative Non-Fiction

The study of fictional narrative has long been a mainstay of NIU’s Later Americanist faculty. Emeritus Professor James Giles is the author of nine scholarly monographs, the most recent being The Spaces of Violence (University of Alabama Press, 2006). He is the co-editor of eight additional volumes, including Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich (Modern Language Association Press, 2004). Widely published on authors as various as Jack London, Charles Chesnutt, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Don DeLillo, Giles’s focus has always been on the traditions of Realism and Naturalism, recently and powerfully applied to the American urban novel. Dr. Giles continues to teach in the department and is available for service on thesis and dissertation committees.

American drama courses are offered by Professor Gomez-Vega and Professor Alexandra Bennett , who is both an expert in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama and a playwright and actor in the Chicago theater scene. This spring she will appear as one of the principals in Doubt:A Parable, staged by the Ashton Repertory Theatre Company.

Likewise, American poetry is taught both by scholars in the field and by practicing poets. Dr. Van Wienen has published a monograph on American poetry of World War I, Partisans and Poets (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and an edited collection of this poetry, Rendezvous with Death (University of Illinois Press, 2003). Dr. Amy Newman is an award-winning poet with four books to her credit; her reviews and articles on contemporary poetry and poets have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Chicago Sun-Times, and College Composition and Communication, among many other journals.

Genre studies in American literature at NIU extend to Creative Non-Fiction, a field in which Dr. Joe Bonomo is both a practitioner and a scholar. He has published in The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, Creative Non-fiction, and elsewhere, and been named a contributing editor and music columnist for The Normal School, a member of the Board of Directors of Quarter After Eight, and a contributing editor at Defunct Magazine. His collection of essays, This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (Orphan Press), appears this year.


If you study Later American Literature at NIU:

NIU English graduate students have regularly given conference presentations and published articles on Later American Literature topics. Over the years, the NIU English Department has nurtured many dozens of dissertators in Later American topics, and consequently many professionals who are today enjoying careers as college or university professors.

We especially welcome: students interested in the study of race and ethnicity in American literature; students interested in American poetry and American narrative, including fiction, nonfiction, and graphic narrative; students inquiring into the meaning of Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism; students curious about the connections between poetry and politics, literature and history, both national and personal.


For More Information

If you have any questions, please call (815-753-1608), email (valtmaier@niu.edu), or stop by the Department of English Graduate Studies office in Reavis 215.

M.A. in British and American Literature program requirements < http://catalog.niu.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=19&poid=3300&returnto=454>

Ph.D. in English requirements < http://catalog.niu.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=19&poid=3254&returnto=582>

Admissions < http://www.engl.niu.edu/graduate/admissions.shtml#native>