Social Justice: Faculty Perspectives

Addison Bross, Professor

I regularly teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the Victorian period in Britain. Given the social problems created by the industrial revolution, the standard texts from this era show writers pointedly struggling with questions of social justice. Much of the content of my forthcoming book-length translation of the memoirs of Tadeusz Bobrowski (maternal uncle of the Anglo-Polish novelist Joseph Conrad) deals with the abolition of serfdom in nineteenth-century Russia and its formerly Polish territories -- a problem viewed by the memoirist as a question of social justice. In a forthcoming collection of essays (Conrad in Context), my contribution is an essay treating in part Conrad's grasp of political and social problems. In October 2005 I presented a paper at the Plowshares National Peace & Justice Conference at Goshen College -- "In Search of Peace: Parsing the Words of War-Advocates." For the past several years I have taught versions of the first-year writing courses (English 1 and English 11) with emphasis on peace and justice in literature. With a colleague in International Relations I direct Lehigh's minor in Peace Studies; I regularly teach the introductory course for this minor.

Kate Crassons, Assistant Professor

My area of specialization is late medieval English literature, and my research and teaching focus largely on questions of ethics, economics, and religion. I am particularly interested in exploring how communities define themselves and justify their ethical practices. How, for instance, does a society come to justify the burning of heretics? How can its members come to recognize the difference between virtue and vice, especially in a world where, as the morality play Nature explains, gluttony can look all too much like good fellowship or covetousness can seem like worldly policy? Specifically, my research explores such semantic slippages in relation to poverty—a force that generated particularly urgent ethical and interpretive crises in the wake of the plague. In The Claims of Poverty I show how literary texts intervene in a widespread cultural conflict questioning the meaning of poverty as either a sacred form of life or a wretched form of hardship associated with sin. At stake in these ideological debates is the crucial question of how a Christian society imagines itself as an ethical body—how it understands its obligations to its most needy members. In focusing on such topics, I attempt, especially in my teaching, to foreground how medieval literature is relevant to the pursuit of justice in the modern world. To this end, I have taught courses on poverty that require students to study medieval literature in conjunction with performing service in the local community. I have recently reflected on the challenges and rewards of this form of pedagogy in an essay entitled "Going Forth in the World: Piers Plowman and Service Learning," forthcoming in Approaches to Teaching Langland's Piers Plowman.

Elizabeth Dolan, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Health, Medicine, and Society minor

I specialize in 18th -century literature and contemporary illness narratives. I research and teach about issues of social justice in relation to feminist theory, in the context of eighteenth-century social movements such as abolition and animal rights, and, in the arena of literary representations of illness, health, and the body. My book, Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era (Ashgate 2008) addresses 18th-century medical topics such as melancholia, contagious eye disease, health travel, and the impoverished ill. In both of my major research fields—eighteenth-century literature and literature and medicine—I study the historical and social contingencies of health, particularly conditions that are difficult to apprehend or define.

Suzanne Edwards, Assistant Professor

My research and teaching explore questions concerning embodiment and agency in the medieval period. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the law and varied literary genres imagine violence and strategies for resistance. My current research project examines the ethical and epistemological ambiguities in legal and literary accounts of rape and ravishment from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. These texts contest the limits of bodily experience, constructing marriage, abduction, and even reading as forms of sexual violence; they engage the complexities of consent, considering what it means, if sexuality is fallen, for anyone to consent to an act that violates bodily and spiritual integrity; and they explore radical possibilities for feminine agency, linking the logic of sexual violence to divine ravishment and to secular governance. In exploring these issues, medieval representations of sexual violence wrestle with the problem of how it is possible to act meaningfully in the face of difficult, often violent, constraints. My research and my teaching both explore how the historically distant but culturally proximate archive of medieval England might help modern readers to re-evaluate the ethical stakes of familiar concepts—including consent, sex, force, and free will—in sometimes surprising ways. The courses I have taught at Lehigh that engage questions related to social justice include “Getting Medieval: Religious, Political, and Sexual Violence,” “Gender and Genre in Middle English Literature,” “Medieval Pagans, Muslims, and Jews,” and “Sex and Gender in the Middle Ages.”

Elizabeth Fifer, Professor

My area is contemporary world and American multicultural literature. Recent essays have been on world fiction, “Hybridity and the Destruction of Indigenous People” (Crossing Borders, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007) and on prison drama , “The Psychology of the Cell” (Ecumenica, forthcoming in 2009). Courses that deal with literature and social justice have been as varied as “Children of Violence,” on world literature about children at risk, “American Ethnic Poetry: Masters on the Margins,” on contemporary American poets such as Joy Harjo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Victor Hernandez Cruz, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, who all discuss social issues in their ethnic communities, and “Identity and Difference: Contemporary British Immigrant Literature,” on the Caribbean writers who came to Britain in the middle of the twentieth century. In it we study such central issues of social justice as integration, exclusion, prejudice, economic stresses and family dynamics, exile, housing, work, and attitudes of the host country toward immigration. My work is centrally focused on identity and how it is shaped and changed by social experience.

Scott Paul Gordon, Professor

My area of specialization has been seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature. My first two projects, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1740-1770 (2002) and The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing (2006) approached issues of literature and social justice only obliquely. The first explored the politics of disinterestedness in a variety of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourses, while the second focused on eighteenth-century women’s writing that depicted the reality we encounter as inevitably mediated by the texts we have read. Thanks to a series of departmental conversations about literature and social justice, my more recent research—on colonial American art and Pennsylvania politics during the Revolution and early Republic—and teaching engage more directly with question of war, peace, and the revolutionary Atlantic world.

Dawn Keetley, Associate Professor of English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies

My research consistently explores the roots of violence, particularly family violence, and how violence among intimates is inextricable from changing social and cultural understandings of gender—and how ending violence is also inextricable from those understandings of gender. My work focuses on the nineteenth century but I try to extend its implications into the present day. Key publications include, “From Anger to Jealousy: Explaining Domestic Homicide in Antebellum America,” forthcoming in the Journal of Social History, Winter 2008; “Pregnant Women and Envious Men in ‘Morella,’ ‘Berenice,’ ‘Ligeia,’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’”Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 38 (2004); “Homicidal Envy: The Case of Richard Henry Dana, Sr.,’s Paul Felton,” Early American Literature 41.2 (2006); and “Victim and Victimizer: Female Fiends and Unease over Marriage in Antebellum Sensation Fiction” American Quarterly 51 (1999). I am currently working on a book project entitled Jesse Pomeroy and the Emergence of Modern Pathology in Nineteenth-Century Boston, which argues that the case of this 14-year old “boy fiend” is the first in the U.S. to illuminate how the conditions of modern life shape a child who is capable of sadistic serial torture and murder. My interest in the causes of violence influences the courses I teach: I have taught a course called “Bad Mothers,” in which we explored why mothers kill their children and how, more generally, “bad mothers” are created. I will offer a similar course in the spring of 2009 called “Bad Children,” about changing conceptions of childhood and how, when, and why children have been capable of evil. I also offer numerous courses in Women’s Studies and feminist theory that all explore the roots of various kinds of social inequality and seek to find ways to transform our stratified society. Such courses include Introduction to Women’s Studies, Chick Lit and Politics, Feminism in Popular TV, and a Seminar in Feminist Theory.

Barry Kroll, Professor

In my recent research and teaching I've been focusing on the ethics and rhetoric of conflict resolution, in both personal disputes and public debates. My search for models of arguing that avoid the difficulties of adversarialism, avoidance, or capitulation has led me to the Asian martial arts, which I use as both a conceptual framework and a set of exercises for teaching. I wrote about an alternative approach to teaching an argument class in "Arguing Differently" (Pedagogy 2005) and most recently outlined an approach to using aikido as a framework for arguing in "Arguing with Adversaries: Aikido, Rhetoric, and the Art of Peace" (College Composition and Communication 2008). My current work focuses on somatic and contemplative approaches to teaching argument as an art of harmony and peace, especially to undergraduates.

Ed Lotto, Associate Professor

My area of specialization is composition and rhetoric, with other minor areas in contemporary theory, the contemporary American novel, and environmental writing. My major interest is in how language shapes our actions, how it enables us to work together for the common good while at the same time holding the power to drive us to inhuman deeds. Recent courses in composition and rhetoric include No Place to Stand: The Problem of Agency in Teaching Writing and a course in Teaching Writing in a Diverse Culture. In these classes, one of the major issues is the relationship between academic writing and personal writing, which includes a variety of dialects. How do we communicate while valuing the different ways people have of writing? Recent papers on this topic include “Academic Prose and the Basic Writer: Liberation or Oppression” and “A Theoretical Justification for Using Personal Writing in a Cultural Studies Course.” In my work on literature, I have addressed the issue of how romantic writing functions to liberate and oppress, the gender inflected characteristics of the American Dream of Freedom, and also teach a course on the Environmental Imagination, which explores how treating nature as having a value in its own right can help us live in harmony with the earth. I have coedited a reader, Constructing Nature, which is structured to help students see how our relationship with the natural world has important implications for our lives.

Seth Moglen, Associate Professor

My research and teaching range broadly across 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture, with particular emphasis on literary modernism and on African American writing. Much of my work has been informed by an evolving concern with the relationship between literature and social justice. I believe that literary texts provide powerful tools for mapping the contours of inequitable and exploitative social formations – and also for articulating utopian intuitions about how we might create freer, more just ways of living. In Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2007), I argue that American literary modernism is, at its heart, an effort to mourn the injuries inflicted by modern capitalism, and I trace the conflict between political hope and despair that structures this literary formation. I have also recently published a new edition of T. Thomas Fortune’s Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South (Simon & Schuster, 2007) – the first socialist book written by an African American and a neglected classic of the black radical tradition. My research on Fortune is part of a larger work-in-progress on 19th- and 20th-century African American literature and politics, provisionally entitled Black Enlightenment. My teaching, like my research, focuses centrally on the relationship between literature and emancipatory social and political movements. Some of my recent courses include: “Imagining Freedom: 19th-Century African American Literature and Politics,” “Modern American Writing and the Problem of War,” “The Harlem Renaissance” and “Modernism and Mourning.”

Rosemary J. Mundhenk, Professor

The courses I teach frequently investigate the cultural assumptions of texts and readers, as well as explore the dimensions of race, class, gender, and physical appearance in literature and film. In “The Grotesque in Art and Literature,” for example, we study the moral dimensions of laughter, the figuration of difference as “freakish,” and the use of the grotesque as a tool of political/social satire and change. My graduate seminar on “The Idea of Work in Victorian Culture and Literature” focuses on the Victorian obsession with, and crisis over, work: male vs. female labor, the Carlylean gospel of work, work as commodity, intellectual labor and artistic production, compensation, and value. Victorian Prose: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 1999), which I co-edited, juxtaposes selections of canonical non-fiction prose with less canonical texts to expose the wide fields of debates about gender, class, race, etc. in the 19th Century. My current research and writing on Margaret Oliphant explores Oliphant’s novels and their cultural assumptions, particularly her reiteration of the Victorian obsession with “work” as a moral attribute. For six years, I served as the College of Arts and Sciences Harassment Investigator; currently I am one of two University Ombudspersons.

Ruth Knafo Setton, Professor of Practice, English Dept.
Writer in Residence, Berman Center for Jewish Studies

In my courses and my writing I examine ways in which literature can be a critical tool in examining, exploring, exposing and illuminating issues in social justice. I am currently teaching “Immigrant Women Writers,” a course that brings to light the situation of immigrants in America, as well as gender issues relevant to all women. Through novels, memoirs and films by immigrant women, we listen to voices we have not heard before as they raise questions about identity, ethnicity, religion, culture, society and justice in contemporary America. I am also teaching a creative reading and writing course, “Love and Murder,” in which we read, discuss and write mysteries and love stories, two forms of narrative that powerfully reflect and reveal truths about social forms, rituals, strictures and judgments. In my second (just-completed) novel, Darktown Blues, I explore the personal and social issues that confront an immigrant family in New Jersey. The Elmaleh family battles not only the expectations of their own culture but the expectations of American society as they fight City Hall’s plans to tear down their neighborhood and replace it with upscale condominiums. I hope to encourage students—and readers—to think about the power of literature in raising awareness of social issues, promoting compassion and tolerance, and bringing about transformation.

Amardeep Singh, Assistant Professor

Social justice is one of the core concerns of postcolonial literature and theory, which is my primary field of study, and one of the major fields I teach. Authors and critics from formerly colonized countries in South Asia, Africa, Ireland, and the Caribbean are deeply concerned with addressing, recognizing and combating global social inequities, whether it's Salman Rushdie's scathing critique of religious extremism in The Moor's Last Sigh, or James Joyce's challenge to xenophobic conceptions of Irish nationalism in Ulysses. In my book, Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2006), and in some subsequent articles relating to the book, I have paid particular attention to the ways in which writers from different national backgrounds address the tension between secular and religious world-views. I see this work as oriented to social justice, since both freedom from religious persecution and the individual right to personal religious expression must be important components of any truly just society.

Barbara Traister, Professor

I teach and do research in British literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, a period characterized by gender and class inequality and by religious, economic, and political upheavals. Whether I write about plague--from which the well-to-do fled while the poor remained in crowded urban spaces--or teach Shakespeare's plays, I find issues of social justice constantly before me. In The Notorious Astrological Physician of London (Chicago, 2001), I studied a poor grocer's apprentice who became a prosperous London medical practitioner, creating and shattering social and ethical codes as he provided health care to rich and poor. In a current research project, I look at the use of anecdote in Holinshed's Chronicles and suggest that in their anecdotes--often about women, Jews, or poor citizens--the chronicle writers give scripted presence to people who would otherwise never have appeared in the pages of early modern history.

Stephanie Powell Watts, Assistant Professor
Bob Watts, Assistant Professor

I teach a service/experiential learning class called Writing about Bethlehem that integrates community service with traditional classroom instruction through directed readings and writings, interviews with campus and area residents, performances and combined community and classroom events. Bob's course about Work is similarly a writing and experiential learning class. He looks at the history of work in America as translated by writers, especially song writers and poets, including protest songs, union chants and work songs. The Creative Writing program sponsors two readings (one in the fall, the other in the spring) that celebrate the ideals of social justice. In the fall students participate in a Reading Against Hunger with proceeds that benefit the Southside Neighborhood Center. In the spring students, faculty and staff read from works that move and inspire them from the African American tradition in a reading to honor Black History Month. Both events are free, campus-wide, public events.

Edward Whitley, Assistant Professor

I teach a number of courses in pre-1900 American literature, along with the occasional survey course that reaches into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All of the classes I teach focus in one way or another on how literary texts can help us come to terms with the myths of American culture and in so doing to imagine a more just and equitable nation. As a scholar I write about the life and poetry of Walt Whitman. In many ways, Whitman embodies all of the American myths that my students and I wrestle with in class, but he also proves to be a very thoughtful commentator on the complexities of life in America. In "Whitman's Occasional Nationalism: 'A Broadway Pageant' and the Space of Public Poetry" (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2006), I look at how Whitman tempered his (at times) over-the-top nationalism with a sympathy for the plight of the working classes on the one hand, and an awareness of America's place in a rapidly globalizing world on the other. Whitman continues to be an important figure for me as I try to understand the relationship between literature and social justice.