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Brian May

Associate Professor

19th-century British Literature Placement Advisor

Office: RH 321
Phone: 753-6623
Email: bmay1@niu.edu

Educational Background


Ph.D. University of Virginia; 1991

M.A. University of Virginia; 1986

B.S. Virginia Polytechnic Institute; 1981


Professional Interests


Modernism, Edwardianism, The Novel, Postcolonial literature, Political and Philosophical approaches to literature

Works of E. M. Forster, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Conrad, J.M. Coetzee


Selected Publications >

Current Courses >

Selected Publications

  • “Extravagant Postcolonialism: Ethics and Individualism in Anglophonic, Anglocentric Postcolonial Fiction; Or, ‘What was (this) Postcolonialism?’” ELH: English Literary History 75.4 (winter 2008): 899-937.
  • “Reading Coetzee, Eventually.” Contemporary Literature 48.4 (Winter 2007).
  • “Romancing the Stump: Modernism and Colonialism in Forster’s Passage to India.” Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1889-1939, Ed. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. 136-61.
  • The Modernist as Pragmatist: E. M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997.

Current Courses

CourseMeeting Days / Time / Room
Fall 2013ENGL 471.1 (details)
MW / 2:00 - 3:15 / RH301
Fall 2013ENGL 662.1 (details)
M / 6:00 - 8:40 / RH302
Spring 2013ENGL 664. (details)
M / 6:00 - 8:40 / RH301
Spring 2013ENGL 414.1 (details)
MW / 2:00 - 3:15 / RH 202
Summer 2011ENGL 414.QE1 (details)
MW / 6:30-9:15 p.m. / Hoffman Estates
Spring 2012ENGL 662.1 (details)
M / 6:00 - 8:40 / RH301
Fall 2012ENGL 414.1 (details)
MW / 2:00 - 3:15 / RH202
Fall 2012ENGL 663.1 (details)
M / 6:00 - 8:40 / RH202