Research Topics
This is a select list and divided by topic area, so students can search by areas of study and research that might be of interest. A full review of faculty interests is available on the faculty profiles page.
Protest and Inequality
Cheryl Boots: Community development through singing; Southern Freedom Movement in the United States
Megan Sullivan: Children of incarcerated parents; disability studies
Victorian Studies
Sheila Cordner: Education and nineteenth century British literature
Joellen Masters: Victorian ghost studies; first wives in Victorian and modernist novels
Natalie McKnight: Charles Dickens; Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Lowell mill factory women; and Dickens’s subversive use of sex slang
Aaron Worth: Victorian horror writer Arthur Machen
Sports and Literature
Christopher Fahy: teaching and writing about sports and literature
Leonard Andres: sabermetrics and the biomechanics of hitting and pitching
American Literature
Christopher Coffman – Poetry and fiction since 1900, especially William T. Vollmann, Thomas Pynchon, and James Merrill
E. Thomas Finan – American Literature before the Civil War
Irish Studies
John Mackey: modern Irish history and Irish identity
Megan Sullivan: Irish women writers
Meg Tyler: Irish poet Seamus Heaney
Philosophy and Literature
E. Thomas Finan: the philosophical implications for literary form
Feminist and Women’s Studies
Joellen Masters: “New Woman” fiction
Kate Nash: Twentieth-century women writers in wartime
Lynn O’Brien Hallstein: contemporary understandings of motherhood and mothering
Creative Writing
Joelle Renstrom: essays and editorials about writing, teaching, travel, science and technology
Robert Wexelblatt: essays on literary and philosophical subjects; a series of Chinese tales; short stories, poems and novels.
Meg Tyler: poetry
Richard Samuel Deese: poetry
Natalie McKnight: creative writing directed studies
Physics and Quantum Mechanics
Millard Baublitz: band structure and electronic properties of LaSr2Mn207; solid state physics
Gregg Jaeger: advanced quantum key distribution
Composition Studies
Matthew Parfitt: the history of reading and teaching writing
Science Fiction and Technology
Joelle Renstrom: intersection of science fiction and technology; robot columnist for The Daily Beast and space news reporter for now.space.
Religion and Social Science
Christopher Rhodes: religion, law, and politics in Africa
Scott Marr: coexistence between religious groups and early modern Europe
Twentieth Century History
June Grasso – Japanese war propaganda about events in China leading up to WW II
Michael Kort – the Vietnam War
Thomas Whalen: twentieth century presidential leadership and politics
Michael Holm: U.S. foreign policy in post-war Europe
Russian Studies
Michael Kort – history of Russia