English Department Faculty

Rick Blackwood
Visiting Professor of English

Rick Blackwood joins Pomona this year from Louisiana State University, where as Associate Professor of English he taught Film and Screenwriting. During his military career, Professor Blackwood served as Chief of Intelligence Requirements for the U.S. Department of Defense, winning the Defense Superior Service Medal in 2005. He has also written and designed projects for the Departments of Defense, and won the Director CIA Intelligence Meritorious Unit Award in 1999. He is the producer of the 1995 PBS documentary American Utopia, and some of his writing credits include Deadlock, Pyramider (co-written with Sam Denno), Dead Before Dawn and many more. He is currently working on a novel, Plaisir d'Amour.

Larisa Castillo
Visiting Assistant Professor of English

I am teaching three classes this semester: British Modernism, Charles Dickens, and Postcolonial Literature and Theory. I am a Victorianist by trade, with interests in 18th century literature and culture, Romantic poetry, the rise of authorship and the law of intellectual property, Modernism, theories of sovereignty, and speech act theory. As far as I know, I will be teaching a class on Victorian literature next semester, as well as a class on "Critiques of Sovereignty." I am working on an essay entitled "Luck and Love in Anthony Trollope's Mr. Scarborough's Family," in which I examine authorship as something contingent and emotive. I also just completed an essay on natural right in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, which will appear in Nineteenth-Century Literature this December.

Toni Clark, Associate Professor of English, English Department Chair
B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara

E-mail: toni.clark@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.8032
Office: Crookshank 103

Interests: modernist and postmodern fiction, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, environmental and feminist literature.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Associate Professor of English and Media Studies
B.A., M.F.A., Louisiana State University; Ph.D., New York University

E-mail: kathleen.fitzpatrick@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.1496
Office: Crookshank 202

Interests: contemporary fiction and media studies; also teaches courses in Marxist and media theory and screenwriting.
Current work: The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television.

Chris Guzaitis
Visiting Instructor of English

Chris Guzaitis joins the English Department and the Gender and Women Studies program at Pomona for the 2007-2008 academic year. Chris has a background in Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Cultural Studies, and Post-National American Studies. Her research looks specifically at how the knowledge produced around "queer" sexualities during the first half of the 20th century was impacted by U.S. military aggression and imperial practices. Her teaching interests include 19th and 20th Century U.S. Literature, Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, Contemporary Queer Cultural Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Gender and Feminist Studies.

Kamran Javadizadeh
Visiting Assistant Professor of English

My research and teaching focuses on twentieth-century American literature and culture. My dissertation project (nearing completion at Yale) is on the dynamic relationship between madness and poetry in postwar America; there, as elsewhere, I am interested in putting a variety of discourses (literary, biographical, theoretical, and so on) into critical conversation. Currently, I'm teaching a section of Literary Interpretation and a course called L.A. Stories, which explores the relationship between the fiction and geography of Los Angeles. Next semester, I'll be teaching three courses: Modern American Fiction; From Antebellum to Postwar: U.S. Literature from 1855-1955; and American Poetry.

Aaron Kunin, Assistant Professor of English
Ph.D., Duke University; M.A., Johns Hopkins University; B.A., Brown University

E-mail: aaron.kunin@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.2209
Office: Crookshank 206

Interests: Early modern literature; Renaissance literature; color theory; preservation; food studies; psychology; the novel; creative writing; contemporary literature; film theory; Henry James

James Kuzner
Visiting Assistant Professor of English
B.A., University of Maryland, College Park
M.A., PhD, The Johns Hopkins University

Interests: Early Modern literature; Shakespeare and film; critical and political theory, including queer theory; the production of space; literature and general economy; the history of selfhood; the history of vulnerability; the history of the present.
Current Work (forthcoming or in print): "Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome" (Shakespeare Quarterly); "Timon of Athens, Sodomy, and General Economy" (in Shakesqueer (Duke UP); "'And here's thy hand': Titus in a Time of Terror" (Shakespeare Yearbook); reviews in SQ and Modern Language Quarterly.

Paul Mann, Professor of English
B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz; M.A., University of Chicago; Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz

E-mail: paul.mann@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.2232
Office: Crookshank 105

Interests: critical theory and the history of literary criticism; twentieth-century poetry and poetry creative writing courses; organized a major in literature, with an emphasis on theory and comparative literary study, that disbanded in 1994.
Current work: Rimbaud in Africa (poetry); Vigils (poetry); The Theory: Death of the Avant-Garde (critical theory); Masocriticism (critical theory).

Brad Pasanek
Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Brad Pasanek is a visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department of Pomona College. His main areas of interest include eighteenth-century literature (British and American), the theory of metaphor, and the so-called digital humanities; but that doesn't mean he isn't also interested in nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century metafiction. Pasanek teaches courses on metaphor, fiction, and the concept of person; women and the rise of the novel; "pre/post-modern" rewritings of eighteenth-century fiction; and Romantic poetry. Last year Pasanek worked as a postdoctoral fellow at USC's Annenberg Center for Communication. Pasanek received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1997 and completed a Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2006.

Sean Pollack
Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Since completing an Ph.D. in English in 1999, Sean Pollack has been active in academic computing and technology while teaching literature and composition part time. His research interests include: Old English poetry and language; medieval women's religious writing, and the history of the discipline. Sean is married to Cristine Paschild who is the director of collections access at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and they have a very large and willful son named Lukas who will be three in October.

Sarah Raff, Assistant Professor of English
On leave 2007-2008
B.A., Ph.D., Yale University

E-mail: sarah.raff@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.2837
Office: Crookshank 104

Interests: theories of reading, narrative, and the novel; Jane Austen; literary instruction and the development of the maxim; 18th- and 19th-century literary culture; and psychoanalytic theory.

Claudia Rankine
Professor of English

My degrees come from Williams College and Columbia University. I have written four collections of poetry and edited two anthologies. I have taught at Barnard College, Iowa Writer's Workshop and University of Houston. I have a daughter who is 4 and a husband who is 46.

Arden Reed, Professor of English B.A., Wesleyan University; M.A., Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University

E-mail: arden.reed@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.2217
Office: Crookshank 102

Interests: Romantic literature, literature and the visual arts, especially in the early modernist period; has recently begun teaching one course a year in Art History.
Current work: Manet, Flaubert, and Modernism: Blurring Genre Boundaries; Constance DeJong: Metal; Regularly reviews for Art in America and The Magazine.

Dara Regaignon, Assistant Professor of English
B.A., Amherst College; M.A. and Ph.D., Brandeis University

E-mail: dara.regaignon@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.8032
Office: Crookshank 205

Valorie Thomas, Associate Professor of English and Black Studies
B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.F.A., University of California, Los Angeles; M.A., Ph.D., Univeristy of California, Berkeley

E-mail: valorie.thomas@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.9242
Office: Crookshank 209

Interests: African- American literature (eighteenth-century through contemporary); also teaches courses in Native American literature and screenwriting.

Kyla W. Tompkins, Assistant Professor of English and Gender & Women's Studies
On leave 2007-2008
B.A., York University; M.A., University of Toronto; M.A. and Ph.D., Stanford University

E-mail: kyla.tompkins@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.2817
Office: Crookshank 204

Interests: Cultural theory; American studies, food studies, nineteenth-century U.S. literature, critical feminist theory

David Wallace, Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English
A.B., Amherst College; M.F.A., University of Arizona
Office: Crookshank 101

Interests: fiction writing and contemporary fiction.
Current work: Girl With Curious Hair; Infinite Jest; A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments; Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; Oblivion: Stories; Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity

Meg Worley, Assistant Professor of English
On leave 2007-2008
B.A., Emory University; Ph.D., Stanford University

E-mail: meg.worley@pomona.edu
Phone: 909.607.8124
Office: Crookshank 203

Interests: Old & Middle English literature; medieval European literature, culture, and linguistics; translation theory; Bible translation; postcolonial theory; children's literature; digital culture; graphic novels; music videos.


Emeriti

Martha Andresen, Professor of English
B.A., B.S., University of Minnesota; Ph.D., Yale University

E-mail: martha.andresen@pomona.edu

Interests: Shakespeare, permance theory and practice, early modern literature through Milton.
Current work: Series on Shakespeare for PBS: "Shakespeare Face to Face: A Series of Intimate Encounters" and companion book.

Ed Copeland

Robert Mezey

Tom Pinney

Steve Young