People

Samuel Ace is a poet, sound artist and photographer. Widely published, he is the winner of the Astraea Lesbian Writers and Firecracker Alternative Book awards, as well as a two-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and National Poetry Series. His first two books will be republished by the Belladonna* Cooperative in 2018. A new collection, Our Weather Our Sea, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books. Research interests include LGBTIQ poetry, 20th and 21st century poetry, experimental and hybrid forms.

Christopher Benfey teaches American literature, specializing in Emily Dickinson and cultural relations between the United States and Asia. He is the author of four books about the American Gilded Age; A Summer of Hummingbirds won the 2009 Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. He writes for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Benfey has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2016, he won an NEH Public Scholar Award to research Rudyard Kipling and America.

Kimberly Juanita Brown's research engages the site of the visual as a way to negotiate the parameters of race, gender, and belonging.  Her book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction and the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space and the women who exist there. She is currently at work on her second book, tentatively titled “Their Dead Among Us: Photography, Melancholy, and the Politics of the Visual.”  This project examines images of the dead in The New York Times in 1994 from four geographies: South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan, and Haiti. 

Iyko Day's research and teaching focus on race, capitalism, settler colonialism and Asian American literature and visual culture. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016).

Andrea Lawlor teaches ESOL and Creative Writing, with a special interest in Queer and Trans Writing. Lawlor's publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016) and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017), which is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a CLMP Firecracker Award. Lawlor also edits fiction for Fence, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs.

Ashley Nadeau completed her PhD in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September 2017. Her research addresses the long nineteenth-century in British literature and culture. Drawing upon critical spatial studies and architectural history, her work examines the relationship between the economic and social histories of built space and the Victorian literary imagination. Her teaching addresses a range of topics, including surveys in British literature, topics courses in literary and cultural studies, and rhetoric and composition. She enjoys developing innovative, interdisciplinary courses and employing digital platforms in the classroom setting.

Susannah Richards is an associate professor of education with an interest in igniting, delighting and cultivating lifelong literacy. Her research interests include strategies that teachers use to meet the needs of highly able learner, the role of diverse literature in expanding students’ worlds and strategies to use a wide variety of contemporary and classic literature for youth for lifetime reading, writing and thinking. In her free time, she reads, sews and when the weather cooperates, gardens (mostly for the healthy appetite of the deer who roam her property).

Amy Rodgers' research focuses on early modern literature and culture, audience and popular culture studies, theories of adaptation, and dance studies. Her publlications include essays on the Renaissance court masque, Hindi-language cinema director Vishal Bhardwaj, Shakespeare's history plays' influence on HBO's Game of Thrones, and performance genealogies that cross different communicative forms, particularly theater and dance. Her first monograph, A Monster With a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press in July of 2018. She is a co-founder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project.

Sally Sutherland teaches courses in Shakespeare, early modern and modern drama, adaptations of plays to film, medicine in literature, and health humanities. She has published on Jacobean revenge tragedy and medieval cycle plays. Before returning to the full-time faculty in 2013, she served Mount Holyoke in a number of administrative capacities: first-year dean, dean of studies, associate dean of faculty, and senior advisor to the president.

Donald Weber’s teaching and research interests include American literature, Multi-ethnic literature, South African literature and culture, and, most recently, the imaginative landscape of contemporary multicultural London. He is currently working on two large projects: a book mapping contemporary Jewish American literature and popular culture; and a book, titled The Anxiety of Belonging, about the fraught relation between “identity” and citizenship in contemporary British and Western European literature and film. He has just returned from a sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the University of London.

Elizabeth Young teaches courses on American literature, women’s writing, film, and visual culture. Her courses often focus on intersections among gender, race, and sexuality in U.S. culture and on combinations of literary and visual materials. Her scholarly research includes the books Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor and Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War. Her current book project is on the representation of animals in nineteenth-century novels, taxidermy, and other cultural forms.