The Literature Program

Cynthia Arrieu-King

Cynthia Arrieu-King’s teaching interests are twentieth-century poetry and fiction with special attention to the New York School Poets, modernism, and Asian-American contemporary fiction and poetry. Her current courses include The American Lyric Poem, Avant-Garde Poetry Workshop, and Collaboration in the Arts, a general studies course that will show students how to teach poetry and visual arts in community arts venues around Atlantic County. In addition to all levels of the creative writing workshops, she hopes to teach a literature course on the contemporary epic poem and general studies courses on the Myth of Asian-America and Literature in Medicine.

Her research examines the effect of visual and other arts on poetry, especially in the work of experimental Asian-American poets like Myung Mi Kim, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and John Yau. Her essays on collaboration, sculpture, new media, or painting and Asian-American identity are being collected into a book called The Uses of Other Art. Her poems have appeared in the chapbook The Small Anything City (Dream Horse Press) and have won honorable mention from John Yau in the Vincent Chin Memorial chapbook contest. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Diagram, Black Warrior Review, etc. and is forthcoming in the new horse less press anthology, Forklift, Ohio and The Lumberyard.

Deborah Gussman

Deborah Gussman researches and teaches the rhetoric of American women’s literature and Native American Indian writing in the early national period. She has published essays  in College Literature, New England Quarterly, Feminist Teacher, and elsewhere. Her ground-breaking article on Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s final novel, Married or Single? appeared in Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, Lucinda Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, eds. Northeastern University Press, and she is a founding member of the Sedgwick Society.

Adalaine Holton

Adalaine Holton comes to the Literature Program from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her dissertation, entitled “The Practices of Black Radical Print,” in 2005. For the last two years she has been teaching at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Adalaine will be teaching Multicultural Literatures.

Lisa Honaker

Lisa Honaker is an Associate Professor of British Literature at Stockton, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century British literature and British and American popular culture. She received a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 1993. Her research and writing projects have focused on both late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular culture.  She has published articles and reviews on Robert Louis Stevenson and American popular cinema.  She is at work now on a project on the history of serial narrative from the Victorian novel to current television (and new media) productions. 

Honaker is also the director of Stockton’s Political Engagement Project, a Carnegie Foundation and American Democracy Project-sponsored initiative that seeks to promote the skills, understanding and motivation of students in their own political engagement, whether in the community, public policy or electoral politics.  She is also the Principal Investigator on an AAC&U grant-funded project, Ordinary Lives of Engagement, which brings citizen-activists onto campus and sends Stockton students out to work with community organizations in order to foster an exchange of ideas and resources. In connection with her work on the Political Engagement Project, she was named a Carnegie Scholar of Political Engagement for 2008-2009.  She is looking forward to a trip to the Carnegie Foundation on the Stanford University campus in January 2009, where she will work with scholars from other schools to develop and disseminate materials and pedagogy to encourage engagement on college campuses. She also worked on a cost-analysis study connected with this Ordinary Lives of Engagement, the honorarium for which has helped to fund speakers in this fall.  In June, Honaker gave three presentations on her work on these projects at the American Democracy Project conference in Snowbird, Utah. 

Honaker published a review article on Laurence’s Raw’s Adapting Henry James to the Screen: Genre, Fiction and Film in English Literature in Transition Winter 2008 issue. She is at work now on a project on the history of serial narrative from the Victorian novel to current television (and new media) productions, addressing this topic in her current Senior Seminar.  She is also working on a project with colleague Fred Mench on suicide and detective fiction for a volume on suicide and the arts. 

Marion Hussong

Marion Hussong brings a focus on comparative literature to the LITT program. Her research concentrates on contemporary German and Austrian literature. She has published a book in German, The Skeleton in the Closet: National Socialism and the Austrian Novel, and continues to investigate how the historical trauma of Nazism affects literary representation. Marion has published multiple articles on Austrian and East German literature in peer-reviewed journals. Her latest essay, co-authored with Israeli social psychologist Dan Bar-On, investigates family conflict among perpetrators and their descendants in the aftermath of the Holocaust. She also maintains a strong teaching interest in children’s and youth literature, art history, and comparative cultural studies. In her LITT courses, Marion and her students will explore synergies between literatures from various cultures and British and American writing.

Kristin Jacobson

Kristin J. Jacobson’s current book project, Domestic Geographies: The Neodomestic American Novel, examines twentieth-century revisions of domestic fiction, a popular nineteenth-century genre. Her work investiages the place of the home and domesticity in contemporary American literature and culture. She also plans to continue research on extreme forms of travel and nature writing, what Jacobson calls “adrenaline narratives.”  

Tom Kinsella

Kinsella organized a successful national conference on Bookbinding at Bryn Mawr College in March, 2007. The conference was held in support of an exhibition on the history of bookbinding that he co-curated, entitled Bound and Determined: Identifying American Bookbindings (it was shown from January 30, to May 26, 2007 at the Mariam Coffin Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College). Finally, his in-depth study of American Signed Bookbindings was published in late August, 2007 by Oak Knoll Press. Reviews, which have been published throughout 2008, have been quite positive.

Nathan Long

Nathan Long has completed a short story collection titled Conveyance, fifteen stories linked thematically by travel–via foot, car, plane, train, bus, etc. and is preparing the manuscript to send out.  Long based some of the stories on his travels, having crossed the US more than twenty times, using various means of travel, from bicycle and dog sled to jet liner. While both travel writing and the ‘road trip’ novel are popular in American literature, there are few story collections that center on modes of travel rather than destination, and which particularly examine how each method of transportation effects a character’s psychology and actions. Conveyance was conceived to explore these themes and to share, in fictional form, the eclectic images and characters he witnessed during his travels. Early on, this project was awarded a Virginia Commission of the Arts grant as well as writing residency fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and at the Ucross Foundation.  Long is currently working on an autobiographical work of fifty unlinked short non-fiction stories tentatively called Short Short Life.  Several of the pieces have appeared in the journal The Sun.   His recent work includes the short story, “The Dog,” republished in The Way We Work by (Vanderbilt Press, 2008); creative non-fiction, “Living on the Body of the Mountain,” published in Tin House (#35, Spring 2008), and scholarly work, “If Queer Theory Were My Lover” (forthcoming, InterAlia, #3).
 

Ken Tompkins

Kenneth Tompkins continues to investigate various technologies and how they might be used in our classrooms.  He maintains a strong interest in bringing virtual 3D historical objects and environments into his classrooms so he continues to design and create 3D objects. He has strong interests in narrative theory, interactive fiction and the possibilities of producing hyperfiction from database records. For 15 years — until 1990 — Prof. Tompkins was the Chief Guide at the premier peasant village archeological site — Wharram Percy — in Yorkshire, England. He continues to teach literature from Beowulf to Milton concentrating on the Middle Ages and Shakespeare. He has taught podcasting and screencasting in the Stockton Tech Academy program in the last two summers.