Faculty Profile
Carol Ann Johnston
(she/her/hers)Professor of English; Martha Porter Sellers Chair of Rhetoric and the English Language (1990)
Contact Information
East College Room 404
717-245-1268
Bio
Her teaching interests include literature of the Early Modern period with foci on Shakespeare, Milton, and lyric poetry; visual poetry including letterpress printing; the history and culture of the book and printing; New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, and Southern Women Writers. Her current research includes Thomas Traherne and seventeenth-century visual culture; John Donne and the book; Eudora Welty's The Bride of the Innisfallen and desire. She has published a book on Eudora Welty's short stories as well as articles on Welty and critical reception, photography, lyric poetry, and language; her manuscript placing poet Thomas Traherne in the context of seventeenth-century visual culture re-centers his work in relation to Civil War politics and includes work on linear perspective, emblem books, court masques, iconoclasm, and mirrors. She has also published articles on Traherne and sectarianism, linear perspective, and court masques. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Hawai'i Review, Pilgrimage, and The Drunken Boat.
Education
- B.A., Baylor University, 1978
- M.A., 1980
- M.A., Harvard University, 1983
- Ph.D., 1992
2025-2026 Academic Year
Fall 2025
ENGL 101 Southern Women Writers
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-05.
WGSS 101 Southern Women Writers
Cross-listed with ENGL 101-06.
MEMS 200 Intro to Literary Studies
Cross-listed with ENGL 220-01.
ENGL 220 Intro to Literary Studies
In literary studies, we explore the work texts do in the world. This course examines several texts of different kinds (e.g., novel, poetry, film, comic book, play, etc.) to investigate how literary forms create meanings. It also puts texts in conversation with several of the critical theories and methodologies that shape the discipline of literary study today (e.g., Marxist theory, new historicism, formalism, gender theory, postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, etc.). This course helps students frame interpretive questions and develop their own critical practice. Prerequisite: 101. This course is the prerequisite for 300-level work in English.
ENGL 341 Early Modern Lyric
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England generally are recognized as the Golden Age of the lyric-the short-poem. We will begin our reading of the sixteenth-century poem with adaptations of Petrarchan sonnets by Wyatt and Surrey, and move to the mastery of the form by Sidney and Spencer. The seventeenth century begins with the revival of the sonnet by Shakespeare, and includes brilliant passionate poems declaiming the love of God and the love of women and men by Herbert, Donne, Wroth, Marvell, and others. In addition to learning the techniques of describing and analyzing these poems aesthetically, we will also discuss the cultural contexts in which our poets lived. Our objective will be to interrogate T.S. Eliot's assertion, early in the twentieth century, that a lyric poem is "the voice of the poet speaking to himself or nobody." As we read and discuss we will ask ourselves, both consciously and unconsciously, how private or how porous brief poems might be. Can artists write in a vacuum, as Eliot implies, alienated from political and financial directives, keeping their work "pure and unsullied?" Instead, if great art is to some extent driven by cultural concerns, such as religious controversy, struggles to define and defend the monarchy, and incipient women's rights, then how do we know where these outside issues enter into the art? MEMS majors: ENGL 220 or permission of the instructor.
ENGL 403 Meth/Models of Lit Schol
This course prepares students to write a senior thesis by exploring key questions and methods in literary scholarship. Students in this seminar will pursue intensive reading, writing and discussion designed to: (1) strengthen their grasp of the history and current configuration of literary studies and related fields; (2) help them frame and begin to pursue the questions that will motivate their senior theses; and (3) hone their critical self-awareness as readers and writers.