Research Topics

This is a select list and divided by topic area, so students can search by areas of study and research that might be of interest. A full review of faculty interests is available on the faculty profiles page.

Protest and Inequality

Cheryl Boots: Community development through singing; Southern Freedom Movement in the United States

Megan Sullivan: Children of incarcerated parents; disability studies

Victorian Studies

Sheila Cordner: Education and nineteenth century British literature

Joellen Masters: Victorian ghost studies; first wives in Victorian and modernist novels

Natalie McKnight: Charles Dickens; Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Lowell mill factory women; and Dickens’s subversive use of sex slang

Aaron Worth: Victorian horror writer Arthur Machen

Sports and Literature

Christopher Fahy: teaching and writing about sports and literature

Leonard Andres: sabermetrics and the biomechanics of hitting and pitching

American Literature

Christopher Coffman – Poetry and fiction since 1900, especially William T. Vollmann, Thomas Pynchon, and James Merrill

E. Thomas Finan – American Literature before the Civil War

Irish Studies

John Mackey: modern Irish history and Irish identity

Megan Sullivan: Irish women writers

Meg Tyler: Irish poet Seamus Heaney

Philosophy and Literature

E. Thomas Finan: the philosophical implications for literary form

Feminist and Women’s Studies

Joellen Masters: “New Woman” fiction

Kate Nash: Twentieth-century women writers in wartime

Lynn O’Brien Hallstein: contemporary understandings of motherhood and mothering

Creative Writing

Joelle Renstrom: essays and editorials about writing, teaching, travel, science and technology

Robert Wexelblatt: essays on literary and philosophical subjects; a series of Chinese tales; short stories, poems and novels.

Meg Tyler: poetry

Richard Samuel Deese: poetry

Natalie McKnight: creative writing directed studies

Physics and Quantum Mechanics

Millard Baublitz: band structure and electronic properties of LaSr2Mn207; solid state physics

Gregg Jaeger: advanced quantum key distribution

Composition Studies

Matthew Parfitt: the history of reading and teaching writing

Science Fiction and Technology

Joelle Renstrom: intersection of science fiction and technology; robot columnist for The Daily Beast and space news reporter for now.space.

Religion and Social Science

Christopher Rhodes: religion, law, and politics in Africa

Scott Marr: coexistence between religious groups and early modern Europe

Twentieth Century History

June Grasso – Japanese war propaganda about events in China leading up to WW II

Michael Kort – the Vietnam War

Thomas Whalen: twentieth century presidential leadership and politics

Michael Holm: U.S. foreign policy in post-war Europe

Russian Studies

Michael Kort – history of Russia