While some imagine the English department as two plateaus separated by a chasm--rhetoric, composition, and professional writing on one side, literature on the other--by training, disposition, and educational mission, I am inclined to view all discourse as existing along a continuum. I claim the privilege to move fluidly along that continuum.
The emphasis of my undergraduate (Catholic University of America) and English master's degree work (University of Illinois) was Medieval and Renaissance literature and I would characterize myself as a médiévaliste manqué (I have little Latin and less Greek). The focus of my doctoral course work and dissertation encompassed critical theory, culture studies, and early American studies. My graduate course work has also included rhetorical studies, composition theory, and technical communication. In addition, I have spent the past several years teaching a two-semester world literature survey, which includes texts from ancient to modern cultures, from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In the 1999-2000 academic year I taught this course on line with a focus on apocalyptic and millennialist texts. (I've summarized my experiences and findings about on-line instruction in a conference presentation, "Virtual Walden: Where I Taught and What I Taught For in Cyberspace.") During the millennial year I taught a course at the College of William & Mary on the Book of Revelation. My scholarly projects have focused on two axes: culture and sexuality/gender; culture and religion/spirituality. You can read selected conferences papers on my college Web site.
During summer 2000 I spent two months in England conducting grant-funded research in East Anglia. My purpose was to explore the relationship between late medieval apocalypticism and Puritan millennialism and the relationship between East Anglian Puritans and New England Puritan communities. While in residence at the University of East Anglia, I had the opportunity to travel around Norfolk and Cambridgeshire as well as conducting research at the Dean and Chapter Library of Norwich Cathedral.
Among the doctoral courses that I've taken at Indiana University of
Pennsylvania are seminars in Melville and Dickinson and a comparative literature seminar
in Romanticism, in addition to courses in American regionalism, the early American novel,
and an independent study of Southern gothicism. I have also researched the life and
writing career of Molly Elliot Seawell, a nineteenth-century Virginia writer. You may want
to visit the Molly
Elliot Seawell Web page that I have developed. In addition, several years ago I
purchased from a Maine rare book dealer a nineteenth-century manuscript of poems, written
in several hands, dated between the 1830s and 1870s, which you can learn about at the Nineteenth-Century
Friendship Book Project home page.
In preparing for my doctoral comprehensive exams I worked with Michael
W. Vella on representations of AIDS and with Patrick Murphy on the modern long poem and
lyric sequences. The first area is the focus of my doctoral dissertation, "AIDS and American Apocalypticism: Discourse, Performance, and the
Cultural Production of Meaning in New York City, 1981-1996." The second area
permitted me closer attention to some favorite poets, including Pound, Eliot, Yeats, H.D.,
Stevens, Williams, Stein, and Merrill. My third comprehensive reading list, prepared
under the supervision of Cecilia Rodriguez-Milanes (now at Central Florida University)
focused on gender theory/gay &
lesbian studies.
In the doctoral dissertation I examined apocalyptic discourse on AIDS, both discoursed produced by the AIDS/HIV affected communities in New York City as well as the hostile representations of Christian fundamentalists and others. This study included a wide range of discursive forms from mainstream fiction to performance art, biomedical discourse, activism and journalism. Because the study is grounded in an understanding of a distinctly American apocalypticism, I explored Puritan discourse, early American writing, European and American Romanticism, gay writing of the twentieth century, and discourse about AIDS.
I have continued research into American Colonial apocalypticism, which I hope to bridge with studies in late medieval English vernacular religious discourses. One product of this research is "Medieval New England Apocalypse: Puritan Appropriations of Catholic Discourses in Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom," a paper that I presented at the University of Leeds (England) in the summer of 2000.
At the same time, over the past two years I have taught the two-semester Survey of World Literature that our college offers. In that sequence of courses, students and I look at writing and culture of the ancient Middle East, the Classical world, the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, African epic tradition, Japanese Noh drama, Native American writing, African post-colonial texts, and modern European writing, including fiction, drama, poetry, and non-fiction. It is an ambitious course for which I have also developed Web pages and resource links.
Some of my research and conference papers over the past few years have centered on 14th- and 15th-century vernacular spirituality as a precursor to Puritan religious discourses, with such figures as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. I have presented a paper at the International Medieval Studies Congress at Kalamazoo on Margery Kempe and the documentation of sanctity and another at the Modern Language Association convention on Julian of Norwich's notions of gender.
I have recently begun research into late medieval vernacular apocalypticism as an analogue to New England Puritan apocalyptic and millennialist discourses.
American Studies
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Version of 2004. Thomas L. Long © 2004