Faculty Profile
Claire Seiler
(she/her/hers)Professor of English (2010)
Contact Information
East College Room 305
717-245-1921
Bio
Claire Seiler's research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary US, British, and Irish literatures; poetry and poetics; public health humanities and literary disability studies; and the history of literacy. She is the author of Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II (Columbia UP, 2020); of essays published or forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Twentieth-Century Literature, and other journals; and of book chapters in Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive (2020), The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English (2023), and elsewhere. Seiler is currently at work on a global literary history of polio. Her work has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. The latter funded the major institutional grant, Beyond the New Normal: Disability, Literature, and Reimagining Social Justice, that Seiler and Professor Alyssa DeBlasio (Russian) are co-directing through 2025.
Education
- B.A., Middlebury College, 2002
- M.Phil., Trinity College, Dublin, 2004
- Ph.D., Stanford University, 2010
Awards
- Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, 2018-19
2024-2025 Academic Year
Fall 2024
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.
WGSS 301 Plague Years
Cross-listed with ENGL 321-01. This course studies British, Irish, and US literature and culture of two public health crises: the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 and the polio epidemics that began in the late nineteenth century. How were the flu and polio represented in literary and popular culture? What forms did a range of texts—innovative novels, women’s magazines, poems, African American newspapers, films—adopt to consolidate or challenge the stories that states preferred to tell themselves about the ravages of the influenza pandemic or the vaccine “victory” over polio? How can the contested literary, political, and cultural legacies of the flu and polio help us to think about both public discourse around COVID-19 and the inequities laid bare by the pandemic? As it pursues these questions, “Plague Years” introduces students to the interdisciplinary fields of the health humanities and disability studies. The course pursues illuminating readings of literary works by James Baldwin, Willa Cather, J.G. Farrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats, among others, and concludes with two signal works of the coronavirus pandemic: Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020).
ENGL 321 Plague Years
Cross-listed with WGSS 301-02. This course studies British, Irish, and US literature and culture of two public health crises: the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 and the polio epidemics that began in the late nineteenth century. How were the flu and polio represented in literary and popular culture? What forms did a range of texts—innovative novels, women’s magazines, poems, African American newspapers, films—adopt to consolidate or challenge the stories that states preferred to tell themselves about the ravages of the influenza pandemic or the vaccine “victory” over polio? How can the contested literary, political, and cultural legacies of the flu and polio help us to think about both public discourse around COVID-19 and the inequities laid bare by the pandemic? As it pursues these questions, “Plague Years” introduces students to the interdisciplinary fields of the health humanities and disability studies. The course pursues illuminating readings of literary works by James Baldwin, Willa Cather, J.G. Farrell, Katherine Anne Porter, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats, among others, and concludes with two signal works of the coronavirus pandemic: Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020).