Faculty

Kara Wittman

Associate Teaching Professor

I study and teach in two sometimes-related fields: the history and theory of the literary and philosophical essay; and critical pedagogy, especially pedagogies of writing and rhetoric. My work on the essay examines the critical and sometimes political resistance of an aesthetic form more often characterized by its winking relationship to argument, certainty, ideological commitment. I鈥檓 also interested in the essay as a form of 鈥渦nknowing,鈥� a literary expression of the philosophical passion of wonder. I am currently working with a visual anthropologist/filmmaker on a project about the...

Dora Zhang

Associate Professor
20th- and 21st-Century British
Critical Theory
Cultural Studies
20th- and 21st-Century American
Narrative & the Novel
Asian American and Asian Diasporic

I am jointly appointed in the departments of English and Comparative Literature and I am affiliated with the Asian American Research Center and the Critical Theory Program. My research interests have focused on Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, novel theory, literature and philosophy, affect theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. More recently, my worked has also turned to contemporary literature, especially Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, and cultural studies.

My first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel ("Thinking...