CASE WESTERN RESERVE - Key Persons
Ana Codita received her PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, specializing in Applied Linguistics and Professional Writing. She has been teaching Academic English and seminar-based writing courses to multilingual students in the SAGES ESL Writing Program at CWRU since 2014. Her research and teaching interests include English for Academic Purposes (EAP), genre-based framework for teaching and learning second language writing, and simulation and gaming.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor Emerita
Athena Vrettos is an Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Case Western Reserve University, where she taught for 26 years and served as Director of Graduate Studies for eight years, retiring in 2022. Vrettos' degrees are from Vassar College (BA, 1981) and the University of Pennsylvania (MA and PhD, 1988). Her research has received fellowship support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Vrettos' scholarly work has focused on Victorian literature and culture, the history of medicine and psychology, and the history of the body and sexuality. Her book Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, 1995) examines the centrality of illness-particularly psychosomatic illness-as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture. She is also the author of a series of articles on the intersections between nineteenth-century literature and the history of psychology and parapsychology. Four of these articles focus on issues of memory: "Displaced Memories in Victorian Fiction and Psychology," discusses fiction by Thomas Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle in relation to late-Victorian psychological and parapsychological speculations about the potential displacement and uncertain ownership of memory; "Dying Twice: Victorian Theories of Déjà Vu" examines a range of literary, medical, and psychological explanations for what came to be called "déjà vu" in the late nineteenth century, demonstrating how déjà vu experiences became a contested area for defining the concept of "normality" in the newly emerging sciences of memory. "'In the clothes of dead people:' Vernon Lee and Ancestral Memory" and "'Little bags of remembrance:' du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson and Victorian Theories of Ancestral Memory" both focus on late-Victorian theories of psychometry and ancestral memory. Three further articles address theories of habit, wandering attention, and emotional traces: "Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition" examines nineteenth-century theories of habit formation, eccentricity, and repetitive behavior patterns, drawing upon Victorian advice manuals, psychological treatises, eccentric biographies, and the fiction of Charles Dickens. "Wandering Attention: Victorian Daydreaming and the Boundaries of Consciousness" examines narratives of wandering attention and their relationship to emerging theories of consciousness in works by George Eliot, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy. Finally, "The Temporality of Emotional Traces in Victorian Fiction and Psychology" (forthcoming, 2023) uses Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native and a variety of writings on emotion by mid- and late-Victorian psychologists to explore questions about the temporal, spatial and intersubjective dimensions of emotional experiences, and the traces emotions might leave on the material world.
During her years teaching at CWRU, Vrettos was the recipient of the John H. Diekhoff Graduate Teaching Award (2008) and the College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award (2011). She taught survey courses for the English Department in nineteenth-century British literature, as well as more specialized courses in Victorian literature and psychology, Victorian literature and the body, nineteenth-century gothic and sensation fiction, nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century children's literature. Vrettos also taught interdisciplinary courses in the medical humanities for the SAGES General Education program, targeted to students studying medicine, nursing, and biomedical engineering.
Christine Olding received her PhD in Literacy, Rhetoric, and Social Practice from Kent State University. Her research interests include multimodal composition, sonic literacies, and the connection between popular culture and classroom pedagogy. She is published on the relation between Foucault's theory of the madman and the early Glam Rock movement, in particular highlighting the work of Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Before coming to CWRU, Christine was an associate professor and department chair turned instructional designer. Her day job allows her to focus on creating impactful student-centered courses for universities across the country.
Dave Lucas was born and raised in Cleveland. He studied literature and poetry at John Carroll University (BA, 2002), the University of Virginia (MFA, 2004), and the University of Michigan (PhD, 2014). His first book of poems, Weather (VQR / Georgia, 2011), received the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Named by Rita Dove as one of thirteen "young poets to watch," he has also received a "Discovery/The Nation Prize and a Cleveland Arts Prize. In 2018, he was appointed the second Poet Laureate of the State of Ohio. A co-founder of Cleveland Book Week and Brews + Prose at Market Garden Brewery, he also teaches at the John Carroll Young Writers Workshop, the Oklahoma Arts Institute, and in the Medical Humanities program at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine.
Job Titles:
- Director of Writing across the Curriculum, Interim Director of SAGES
- SAGES Instructional Coordinator
Erika Olbricht has her PhD in English from the University of New Hampshire. Her dissertation focused on seventeenth-century British theatre and dramatic literature by women. She also holds an MA in Historic Gardens and Landscape Conservation from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Her work there focused on kitchen gardens, including allotments, and early American gardens. Her interest in historic green space and productive gardens informs her current scholarly work, which includes articles on early modern sericulture and apiculture (silkworms and bees). In 2006-7, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University in Agrarian Studies, where her work focused on sixteenth-century agricultural tithing practices as part of a larger project on early modern British landscape.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Writing Resource Center
- Director of Writing Resource Center
Gabrielle Parkin (PhD, University of Delaware) works on late medieval English literature and is most interested in understanding how merchants and artisans of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries experienced their material world. Through her work she seeks to interpret domestic goods, like clothing and prayer books, through their affective and sensual histories. Gabrielle became interested in the material culture of the late medieval world as a way to share seemingly difficult or inaccessible texts with students. An enthusiastic teacher of writing and literature across time periods, Gabrielle designs courses so that students interact with music, film, and objects to understand the text and its audience's passions, desires, and fears. Gabrielle also enjoys giving presentations to the general public. She has given numerous talks on the tactile experience of medieval prayer books and on medieval clothing, and welcomes the opportunity to speak to any group interested in the late medieval world.
Job Titles:
- Oviatt Professor Emeritus
Gary Lee Stonum is an Oviatt Professor Emeritus in the English Department of Case Western Reserve University, where he taught for 41 years until retirement in 2013. He chaired the department for eleven years, over three discontinuous terms. Stonum's degrees are from Reed College (BA, 1969) and Johns Hopkins (MA and PhD, 1971 and 1973). He is a past president of the College English Association of Ohio, and while department chair he was active in the Association of Departments of English.
His scholarly work has been mainly in 19th and 20th century American literature and in literary theory. He has written books on William Faulkner (William Faulkner's Career, Cornell UP) and on Emily Dickinson (The Dickinson Sublime, U of Wisconsin P), co-edited another book on Dickinson (Emily Dickinson and Philosophy, Cambridge UP) and written more than two dozen articles on various topics in American literature and literary theory.
From 1999 through 2005 he edited The Emily Dickinson Journal, and he was one of the founding members of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Along with Martha Woodmansee, he helped bring the Society for Critical Exchange to Case, and for its first five years there served with her as co-director. During that time he founded and ran the Electronic College of Theory, one of the first internet sites in literary studies. Prior to that he helped organize and run Bellflower (previously Arete) Press, the only departmentally based publisher of humanities monographs in the United States. For about ten years he was a regular book reviewer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has also regularly contributed chapters to the annual volumes of American Literary Scholarship.
Stonum taught courses in American literature, modernist and postmodernist literature, narrative, literary theory, and less regularly Victorian literature, lyric poetry, African-American literature, and journalism. He has directed nearly twenty dissertations, mostly on modern American and African-American literature.
George Blake has published articles in Popular Music, Ethnomusicology, and Journal of the Society for American Music. His current project explores how musical genres intersect with ideas about place. He also hosts a podcast highlighting local performers and teaches musical histories of Cleveland neighborhoods. Blake has received funding for his work from the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship and the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research. He writes community journalism at The Land.
Job Titles:
- Coordinator of ESL Writing
- Director of Writing for Non - Native Speakers
James Newlin received his PhD in English from the University of Florida. His teaching and research interests include Shakespeare, early modern British literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television (University of Alabama Press, 2024) and the co-editor, with James W. Stone, of New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains (Routledge, 2024). His scholarship has also appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, SubStance, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and in other journals and edited collections. He is currently developing a book project on allusions to King Lear in Romanticism and in the critiques of Romanticism by Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Lacan. A complete CV is available at his personal website.
John Higgins received his PhD.in Literatures in English from the University of California - San Diego with a specialization in the literatures and cultures of 16th and 17th century England. His research explores the intersection between Literary Studies, Social History, and theories of the public sphere by studying dramatic texts, popular print culture, legal and political documents, and other archives that provide records of the active role that non-aristocratic men and women played in shaping and participating in early modern English governance. He has published articles in English Literary Renaissance and the Journal of Early Modern Studies, and is currently working on a book manuscript on early modern drama and popular politics. Due to his interdisciplinary research and academic training, he has had the opportunity to teach a broad range of courses, including surveys of Western Humanities, World Cultures and British Literature, Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, and collaborative courses in the SAGES Program with colleagues in Engineering, Business and Astronomy. Inspired by his research and thinking on the public sphere, he believes that learning should aspire to be an active, collaborative process where students create knowledge through research, discussion, and writing.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Practice of Representative
John Wiehl has interests in the practice of representative democracy, literary forms, religious history, and cultural theory. His research and teaching range across nineteenth century British literature, from Romantic era poetry to later Victorian novels. He received a PhD from the University of Florida and MA and BA degrees from the University of Kansas, and he has also taught at Cornell College.
Joe DeLong has an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati. He's the author of How We Measure (Finishing Line, 2021), a full-length poetry collection. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly¸ Puerto del Sol, Nimrod, Cimarron Review¸ and Redactions. His other publications include visual poetry, literary scholarship, and translations (with Noriko Hara) of contemporary Japanese poet Ken'ichi Sasō.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Writing Program Director, Oviatt Professor and Associate Professor
Kimberly Emmons, Director of the Writing Program, Director of Writers House
216-368-6924 (kke1@case.edu)
Job Titles:
- Director of the Cleveland Humanities Collaborativ
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
Louis Giannetti is a Professor Emeritus of English and Film. He has taught courses in film, literature, drama, writing, and humanities. He has published many articles, both popular and scholarly, on political subjects, literature, and drama. In addition to being a professional film critic for several years, he has written about movies for such scholarly journals as Literature Film Quarterly, The Western Humanities Review, and Film Criticism. Dr. Giannetti is also the author of Godard and Others: Essays on Film Form, Masters of the American Cinema, Flashback: A Brief History of Film, and most recently Understanding Movies which has been translated into four languages.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Director of Graduate Studies
Job Titles:
- Professor Emerita of English and African American Studies
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Undergraduate Committee
- Director of First - Year Writing
Job Titles:
- Professor Emerita of English and Law
Martha Woodmansee received her MA and PhD in German and English from Stanford University with a specialization in literary theory. She has been a member of the English faculty at CWRU since 1986, and the Law faculty since 2002. She has also taught at Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Pittsburgh. From 1990 to 2008 she was Director of the Society for Critical Exchange (SCE), a national organization devoted to collaborative interdisciplinary research in theory, and since 2008 she has served as a (founding) director of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP).
Professor Woodmansee has published widely at the intersection of aesthetics, economics, and the law. Her books include The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (Columbia UP 1994); The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, co-edited with Peter Jaszi (Duke UP 1994); The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, co-edited with Mark Osteen (Routledge 1999); and a collection devoted to invention across the disciplines, Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective (U Chicago P 2011).
Professor Woodmansee has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Ford, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundations.
As Director of the Society for Critical Exchange from 1990 to 2008 Professor Woodmansee was instrumental in fostering scholarly research across traditional disciplinary boundaries, especially those dividing literary, economic, and legal studies. These initiatives have resulted in burgeoning new research focuses in "authorship studies" and "new economic criticism," and they have drawn in lawyers and economists to grapple with the historical and theoretical roots of issues of such pressing public concern as the legitimacy and limits of intellectual property.
At CWRU Professor Woodmansee was instrumental in developing the English Department's PhD concentration in Writing History and Theory (WHiT) and in establishing a university-wide Center for the Study of Writing. She taught a range of courses, from 18 th and 19 th century British and European literature and culture, to book history, critical theory, and law and literature. Recent law and literature offerings included a University Seminar on intellectual property pirates and privateers, an advanced undergraduate collaboratory on rights in traditional culture and bioknowledge, and a graduate seminar devoted to intellectual property and the construction of authorship. Biannually she directed the Arts & Sciences Dissertation Seminar, which she developed with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1996.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor Emerita
Suzanne Ferguson is a Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor Emerita of Humanities. She came to Case Western Reserve as Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences in 1989, and after the formation of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1993 she became Professor of English, serving as Chair from 1996-2000, when she retired. She had previously served as Professor and Chair of English at Wayne State University (1983-89) and prior to that was Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University (1971-83). Her PhD was from Stanford.
Her research and teaching were in 20th-century literature, with special interests in the history of the Short Story and American fiction and poetry of the later 20th century. She wrote on Randall Jarrell, on Poetry and Painting, and while at CWRU developed a strong interest in recent Native American fiction, writing on such figures as Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch.
Throughout her career she maintained a strong avocational interest in Early Music, and while at CWRU became the founding President of Apollo's Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra. She also served on the national boards of the American Recorder Society and the Viola da Gamba Society of America, of which she was president from 2004-08. Her most recent publication is Pastime with Good Company: The Continuing History of the Viola da Gamba Society of America (VdGSA, 2013), co-authored and edited with Jean Seiler.
Ferguson continues to study the viola da gamba and plays with "Green Flash, a Consort of Viols" in Ft. Myers, Florida. She also leads and cooks for Service Trips of the Sierra Club, mostly in California and Florida.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished University Professor
Job Titles:
- Oviatt Professor Emeritus