Faculty Profile
Claire Seiler
Associate Professor of English (2010)
Contact Information
East College Room 305
717.245.1921
Bio
Seiler's research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary US, British, and Irish literature, poetry and poetics, and the history of literacy. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Literature, Modernism/Modernity, Auden at Work (2015), Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights (2016), and elsewhere. Seiler's first book, Midcentury Suspension, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. The project fuses extensive archival research in mid-twentieth-century print and public culture, theoretical accounts of modernity and modernisms, and analyses of key texts to offer a new account of the postwar imaginary. Recent courses include: Celtic Revival/Harlem Renaissance; War, Race, and US Literature since 1945; and Women Write War. At Dickinson, she contributes to the departments of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In 2018-19, she is chair of American Studies.
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
2019-2020 Academic Year
Spring 2020
ENGL 101 Women Write War
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-01.
This course studies American women’s war writing from the Civil War through the “war on terror.” Our guiding questions include: what literary forms have women writers adapted or developed to represent war, as well as the social, political, bodily, and emotional effects of armed conflict? How has women’s war writing participated in debates about feminism, citizenship, civil and human rights, and the American project? How have women's intersectional experiences and changing social roles impacted the genre of war writing, and vice versa? Primary texts include works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography by Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Elyse Fenton, Frances E.W. Harper, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toyo Suyemoto, and Natasha Trethewey.
WGSS 101 Women Write War
Cross-listed with ENGL 101-01.
This course studies American women’s war writing from the Civil War through the “war on terror.” Our guiding questions include: what literary forms have women writers adapted or developed to represent war, as well as the social, political, bodily, and emotional effects of armed conflict? How has women’s war writing participated in debates about feminism, citizenship, civil and human rights, and the American project? How have women's intersectional experiences and changing social roles impacted the genre of war writing, and vice versa? Primary texts include works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography by Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Elyse Fenton, Frances E.W. Harper, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toyo Suyemoto, and Natasha Trethewey.
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 War, Race, & US Lit Since 1945
This course studies the inextricable literatures of race and war in the United States since 1945. We will attend equally to how literary forms and critical theories of race and the racial break bear on writing about World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the post-9/11 “war on terror.” Writers will include Hersey, Inada, Komunyakaa, Morrison, Okada, Phillips, and Silko.
