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 Creative Writing, with a special interest in both Queer/Trans Writing and ESOL 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 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.

Amy Rodgers' research focuses on early modern literature and culture, audience and popular culture studies, theories of adaptation, and dance studies. Her publications 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. In her role as Dean for the Senior Class, Rodgers focuses on offering additional academic guidance to seniors as they progress toward graduation and shape their goals for the future; she also supports faculty advisors and department chairs in their work with seniors.

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.