Faculty
UB English Department Faculty: prize-winning teachers and scholars
English Department faculty members are recognized by UB and by the SUNY system as superb teachers. The Department has two SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professors, six faculty who have won SUNY Chancellor Awards for Excellence in Teaching, and several who have won other teaching awards, including the Milton Plesur awards, which are voted on by undergraduates. English faculty also include three SUNY Distinguished Professors, winners of a Pulitzer Prize, nomination for a Grammy Award, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and several other scholarly research awards, the Pushcart Prize, awards for ethnographic writing and folklore, and awards for research and creative work abroad—like the Chevalier, l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and Alexander von Humboldt Fellowships in Germany. Some of our prize-winning faculty include:
Department Chair, Cristanne Miller, Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature, received her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She has published four books, including Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar and Cultures of Modernism, edited seven books, and won national and international research fellowships. Her areas of expertise include Emily Dickinson, modernist poetry, and Civil War era poetry. She has edited the Emily Dickinson Journal since 2005, and won two teaching awards at Pomona College, where she taught before coming to UB.
Carrie Tirado Bramen—winner of a SUNY Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching award—holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Professor Bramen has published The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness, with Harvard University Press, and numerous essays on topics ranging from identity politics to the urban picturesque. Her current research is on the history of American niceness. Professor Bramen specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and in Latino/a literature and cultural theory.
Diane Christian—SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor—holds a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. She is most popular among undergraduates for her course “Heaven, Hell and Judgment,” which surveys verbal and visual texts of concerning punishment, reward and judgment from ancient Sumer to modern film, and is cross-listed with five departments. Christian has co-produced, directed and edited six documentary films with Bruce Jackson, including Creeley (about the late poet and UB Professor, Robert Creeley), and Death Row, which is currently being adapted for the French stage. She and Professor Jackson also instituted the Buffalo Film Seminars, a cinema class set in a downtown theater and open to the public.
Joan Copjec—UB Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture—received her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and attended both the Orson Welles Film School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Film Unit of the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She also specializes in feminist and women’s studies and psychoanalytic theory. She has published widely on all of these subjects and her works have been translated into ten languages. Her undergraduate courses have included Cinema and Surrealism; You’re No Don Juan! Female Desire and Disappointment; Hitchcock and Lacan; and Iranian Cinema.
Robert Daly—SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and winner of multiple teaching awards—holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and has published God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry. Professor Daly has received many awards, but the one that best indicates the enthusiasm and erudition he brings to the classroom came when the undergraduate-run magazine, Generation, selected him as UB’s “Favorite Professor” in 2001. His undergraduate courses include The American Renaissance, Hawthorne, and Visions of America.
Bruce Jackson—SUNY Distinguished Professor—holds an M.A. from Indiana University and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University from 1963-1967. Professor Jackson has taught a wide range of undergraduate classes, including Social Documentary, Faulkner, and Crime and Punishment. He has published over twenty books, directed nine documentary films (six of which were co-directed with Professor Diane Christian), and has had eighteen solo photography exhibits. In 2002, Professor Jackson was named the Chevalier, l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and he was nominated for a Grammy in 1974.
David Schmid—winner of a Milton Plesur Teaching Award and a SUNY Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award—received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. His first book, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture was published in 2005. In addition to popular and academic publications, he has made numerous media appearances, including an interview on AP radio on Pulp Fiction and two NPR appearances. At the undergraduate level, Professor Schmid has taught classes on contemporary British fiction, contemporary American Culture (including a class on Beat Culture), celebrity, and sections of American Pluralism.
Rachel Ablow
Assistant Professor
Victorian literature and culture, the novel, gender and sexuality studies
Dimitri Anastasopoulos
Assistant Professor
Fiction Writing, Avant-Garde Fiction, Postmodern Metafiction, Contemporary
American Fiction.
Barbara Bono
Associate Professor
Renaissance, Shakespeare and his cultural surrounds
Carrie Tirado Bramen
Associate Professor
American literature, Latino/a literature
Diane Christian
SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor
Blake, the Bible, mythology, documentary film
Mili Clark
Associate Professor
Medieval, Milton, 17th century, philosophy
Joseph Conte
Professor
20th century poetry and poetics, postmodern fiction, postmodernism
Joan Copjec
UB Distinguished Professor
Film, Lacan, critical theory
Robert Daly
SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor
American literature
Kenneth Dauber
Professor
American literature
Tim Dean
Professor
Psychoanalysis, queer theory, poetry
Susan Eilenberg
Associate Professor
Romanticism, Milton
Jerold Frakes
Professor
Medieval European literature
Nathan Grant
Associate Professor
African-American literature and culture, modernism, cultural studies
Graham Hammill
Associate Professor
Early-modern British literature, cross-disciplinary studies in critical theory and visual arts
James Holstun
Professor
World Literature, Marxism, early modern literature
Stacy Hubbard
Associate Professor
American literature, modernism, feminism, poetry
Bruce Jackson
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture
Narrative theory and performance, film, folklore, Faulkner
Damien Keane
Assistant Professor
Irish Writing, Transnational Late Modernism, Sound
Myung Mi Kim
Professor
Poetry and poetics
Arabella Lyon
Associate Professor
Rhetorical theory, ordinary language philosophy, feminist theory
Ming Qian Ma
Associate Professor
American literature, poetry and poetics
Ruth Mack
Assistant Professor
18th Century British literature
Carine M. Mardorossian
Associate Professor
Postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature, feminist criticism
Carla Mazzio
Associate Professor
Late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature with an emphasis on drama and prose
Steve McCaffery
Professor, David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters
Poetics, critical theory, contemporary literature
Cristanne Miller
Professor, Department Chair and Edward H. Butler Chair in English
Poetry, American literature, American Civil War
Steven Miller
Assistant Professor
Psychoanalysis, critical theory, drama
Christina Milletti
Assistant Professor
Fiction Writing, 20th Century Novel, Experimental Fiction, Gender
Susan Moynihan
Assistant Professor
Asian American literature
Roy Roussel
Randy Schiff
Assistant Professor
Medieval literature and culture, textual criticism, theory
David Schmid
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Admissions
20th Century British and American fiction, popular culture, cultural studies
Neil Schmitz
Professor
American literature
Mark Shechner
Professor
American literature, Joyce
William Solomon
Associate Professor
20th Century American Literature
Alan Spiegel
Professor
Modern literature, film
Scott Stevens
Assistant Professor
Early modern British literature, American Indian studies
Andrew Stott
Associate Professor
Early modern British literature, comedy
Dennis Tedlock
SUNY Distinguished Professor and James H. McNulty Chair of English
Native American literature, ethnopoetics, hermeneutics
Hershini Young
Associate Professor
Contemporary black diasporic literature
