People

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,  Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War, and Pet Projects:  Animal Fiction and Taxidermy in the Nineteenth-Century Archive.

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 Creative Writing, with a special interest in queer/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 (Vintage, 2019), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary and a CLMP Firecracker Award. Lawlor also edits fiction for Fence, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. 

Mark Shea is an applied linguist with a focus on second language acquisition and pedagogy. His research focuses on quantitative and qualitative approaches to describing language development in postsecondary contexts. At Mount Holyoke, his courses include First-Year Seminars and courses on public speaking, academic writing and various aspects of multilingualism.

Jerrine Tan has presented at several conferences and has worked as a translator on an advanced Chinese textbook, “China in Depth” (Peking University Press). Her international approach to research has been supported by various international fellowships, such as the Fudan University Graduate Research Fellowship and an interdisciplinary fellowship from Brown Graduate School. Tan was a graduate representative in her department for six years and served on the Graduate Student Council as International Graduate Student Advocate.