New Faculty Profiles

Cynthia Callahan (Ph.D., University of Delaware) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English (Mansfield campus) specializing in American literature. Her dissertation, "Birth Writes: Transracial Adoptive Identities in American Literature," explores American cultural anxieties about racial, familial, and national identity in 20th-century fiction featuring children of color raised by white parents, such as William Faulkner’s Joe Christmas. A section of the dissertation on The Quarry, a novel by 19th-century African American writer Charles Chesnutt, has been published in Modern Fiction Studies. Professor Callahan also teaches composition and American multiethnic literatures.

Joining us as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Alan Farmer (Ph.D., Columbia University) focuses on Renaissance drama in his research and teaching. Professor Farmer has published several essays on English drama of the 16th and early 17th centuries; his co-authored article "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited" has recently appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly. He is currently working on a book-length project about playbooks and newsbooks in 1630s England, and he has helped create two on-line resources for scholars of the Renaissance: the "Database of Early English Playbooks," which allows scholars to investigate the ways English Renaissance drama was advertised, sold, and consumed in the marketplace of printed books; and "Shakespeare and the Book," a Web site offering an introduction to the early modern playbook and to the authors, actors, publishers, and printers behind its creation. This year, he is teaching several courses on Shakespeare, including "Shakespeare on Film."

Alan Gallay (Ph.D., Georgetown University) joins our faculty in the Department of History as a Full Professor and also the Warner Woodring Chair of Atlantic World and Early American History. His distinguished research record includes being awarded the 2003 Bancroft Prize, given by Columbia University to a distinguished book in American History, for The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. In addition to this book, Professor Gallay is the author of The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier, which examines the interactions of Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans in the creation of the plantation economy. He is also the editor of three collections, including the forthcoming Indian Slavery in Colonial America. A specialist in colonial U.S. history, Professor Gallay offers courses on Colonial America, the American Revolution, the American South, and Atlantic history. He is currently working on a book entitled "Raleigh and the Origins of English Colonialism."

Hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Richard A. Gordon (Ph.D., Brown University) is currently completing a book manuscript entitled "Cannibalizing the Colony: The Cinematic Consumption of Colonial Literature in Latin America." As this title suggests, his area of expertise is Latin American cultural studies, an area in which he has published several essays and taught a range of courses that focus on Brazil and Spanish America. This year Professor Gordon will teach an undergraduate course in English on Latin American film and a graduate course in Spanish on "Representing the African Diaspora of Colonial Latin America," among others. He has previously taught at Southern Methodist University, Brown University, and Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain).

Christine (Cricket) Keating (Ph.D., University of Washington), a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies, works in the field of gender and politics, with a particular emphasis on global and postcolonial feminism. She has completed a book manuscript, "The Postcolonial Sexual Contract," and published a number of essays, including "Democracy and its Inclusions: Globalization and the Transformation of Participation," which appeared in Signs, the premier journal of feminist studies. Professor Keating has spent a great deal of time studying gender politics and the women’s movement in Sri Lanka. She has received several awards, including one for teaching excellence at the University of Washington as well as a Fulbright Research Fellowship for conducting field work in Sri Lanka.

Manuel (Manny) Martínez (Ph.D., Stanford University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, specializing in Latino/Chicano studies and contemporary American literature. His book, Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera, calls for a practice of "Americano studies" that analyzes how Mexican Americans participated in the remapping of American culture by engaging in issues facing all Americans in the thirty years following World War II. He is currently at work on a second volume, In Search of El Pueblo Libre: Ernesto Galarza and the Emergence of an Americano Social Criticism, which further develops the critical practice he advocated in Countering the Counterculture. Professor Martínez is also a creative writer, having published two novels, Drift and Crossing, with a third in press. He has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Ford Foundation/National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Kevin Scharp (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) joins us as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy (Marion campus). His areas of specialization are the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Professor Scharp has published several essays, and is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume In the Space of Reasons: Selected Writings of Wilfrid Sellars, for which he also wrote the introduction. As a graduate student at Northwestern and Pittsburgh, he received several recognitions, including the honor of being selected to serve as the teaching assistant of Jürgen Habermas, one of the preeminent philosophers of our time. This year, he will teach Introduction to Philosophy, Introduction to Ethics, and Introduction to Logic.