Contributors

C o n t r i b u t o r s R. J. (Dick) Ellis is professor of American studies at the University of Birmingham, head of the department of American and Canadian studies, and fellow of the English Academy. He is the author of over seventy articles and books including Liar, Liar! Jack Kerouac—Novelist (Greenwich Exchange 1999) and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: A Cultural Biography (Rodopi 2003), and he is the editor of Small Beer, the memoirs of the Communist activist Nan Green. He is working on a new edition of Our Nig (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) and edited (with others) a collection of essays on post- bellum American women’s writing, entitled Becoming Visible (Rodopi 2010). He was the founding editor of Comparative American Studies. Ellis curated for the Barber Institute in Birmingham in 2008–2009 the only exhibit in the U.K. of the original 1951 manuscript of Kerouac’s On the Road . Jane Falk is senior lecturer in English composition at the University of Akron. She has contributed an appreciation of Philip Whalen’s The Diamond Noodle to Continuous Flame, a tribute volume to Whalen (Fish Drum 2005), as well as Whalen biographies to the Encyclopedia of Beat Literature (2007) and the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry (2005). An essay on Zen and the poetry of Philip Whalen has recently appeared in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature (SUNY 2009). She is working on an essay about Joanne Kyger’s video production Descartes . Jimmy Fazzino is a doctoral candidate in literature and teaches in the literature, writing, and creative writing programs at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been a contributor to The Beat Review and has several articles on the Beats forthcoming in The Literary Encyclopedia . Research interests include twentieth- century American literature and modern poetry and poetics. His dissertation is entitled “Beat Subterranean: Assemblages of Influence and Beat Writing in World Contexts.” Christopher Gair is head of English literature and associate director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of Complicity and Resistance in Jack London’s Novels (Mellen 1997), The American Counterculture (Edinburgh UP 2007), and The Beat Generation (Oneworld 2008), and is the editor of Beyond Boundaries: C. L. R. James and Postnational Studies (Pluto 2006). He edited editions of Stephen Crane’s Maggie: a Girl of the Streets (Trent 2000) and Jack London’s South Sea Tales (Random House 2002). He has 250 Contributors published essays in Modern Fiction Studies , Journal of American Studies , Studies in the Novel, and Studies in American Literature and is editor of Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations . Konstantina Georganta is the co-director of the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School hosted at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her doctor- ate in 2009 in the department of English literature at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis, now under contract to the Rodopi Series in Comparative Literature, explores encounters between British and Greek poetry in the period 1922–1952 and considers the work of T. S. Eliot, C. P. Cavafy, W. B. Yeats, Kostes Palamas, Demetrios Capetanakis, John Lehmann, and Louis MacNeice. She has published on T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” William Plomer’s poetry, and short stories on 1930s Greece. Nancy M. Grace is the Virginia Myers Professor of English at The College of Wooster, where she is chair of the department of English and the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program. She is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature (Mellen1995), co-editor of Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (with Ronna C. Johnson, Rutgers UP 2002), co-author of Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers (with Ronna C. Johnson, UP of Mississippi 2004), and author of Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave 2007). She also published and edited 681 Lexington Avenue: A Beat Education in New York City 1947–1945 (Greater Midwest 2008) by Elizabeth von Vogt, sister of John Clellon Holmes. The Choice Top 100 Title was awarded in 2004 for Breaking the Rule of Cool and in 2007 for Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination . She has published essays on Beat literature, women Beats, Kerouac, and Joyce. Grace is a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association and co-editor of The Journal of Beat Studies . M i c h e l e Hardesty is assistant professor of U.S. literatures at Hampshire College. She is the author of “Looking for the Good Fight: William T. Vollmann’s An Afghanistan Picture Show ,” published in the summer 2009 issue of boundary 2. Her research and teaching interests concern the intersections of politics and culture in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. She is working on a project concerning U.S. writers who traveled to and wrote about conflicts in the Third World during the Cold War. Allen Hibbard is professor of English and director of the Middle East Center at Middle Tennessee State University; he has also taught at the American University in Cairo and was a Fulbright lecturer at Damascus University. He is the author of Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne 1993) and Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco (Cadmus 2004), the editor of Conversations with William S Burroughs (UP of Mississippi 2000), and has published a collection of his own stories in Arabic. Hibbard’s research explores the history of interactions, interpenetrations, and cross-pollinations between the United States and the Arab world, from the perspectives of modernism, post-colonialism, globalization, genre, transnational Contributors 251 movement, and translation. His current projects include a volume on the modern Arabic poet Adonis, a translation of Syrian writer Haidar Haidar’s novel A Banquet for Seaweed , and a biography of the gay Jewish American writer Alfred Chester. Ronna C. Johnson is a lecturer in English, women’s studies, and American studies at Tufts University, where she has also been director of women’s studies. Her recent publications include Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (with Nancy M. Grace, UP of Mississippi 2004) and Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (with Nancy M. Grace, Rutgers UP 2002). She is writing Inventing Jack Kerouac: Reception and Reputation 1957–2007 (forthcoming 2012, Camden House). She has presented and published on Jack Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, Lenore Kandel, and Brenda Frazer, as well as work on women Beat writers and gender in Beat movement discourses. Johnson is a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association and co-editor of The Journal of Beat Studies . A. Robert Lee is professor of American literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, and formerly taught at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. His recent books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (Pluto 1998), Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (UP of Mississippi 2003), United States: Re-Viewing Multicultural American Literature (U of Valencia 2009), Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (Rodopi 2009), and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (Routledge 2010). He also edited The Beat Generation Writers (Pluto 1996) and has published essays on Beat writers, including William S. Burroughs, Ted Joans, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and international figures including Andrei Voznesenky and Kazuko Shiraishi. Hassan Melehy is associate professor of French and francophone studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Much of his scholarship has been on early modern philosophy and literature in addition to twentieth-century think- ers. He has published Writing Cogito (SUNY 1997) and The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Ashgate 2010) and has translated a number of works of philosophy and social science, including Jacques Rancière’s The Names of History (Minnesota UP1994). He has authored articles on Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, and Rancière and has also written on the films of Robert Altman, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ernst Lubitsch. Melehy’s current research focuses on Jack Kerouac’s role in Québécois literature of the last forty years. Fiona Paton is assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she teaches American literature and specializes in Beat writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Recent publications include “Monstrous Rhetoric: Naked Lunch , National Insecurity, and the Gothic Fifties” ( Texas Studies in Literature and Language 2010) and “Reconceiving Kerouac: Why We Should Teach Dr. Sax ” in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays (Peter Lang 2002). 252 Contributors Josef Rauvolf is a journalist, writer, and translator who lives in Prague. He studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague, and while doing menial jobs worked for samizdat editions, and for dissent. After the fall of communism in 1989, he published translations of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch , Nova Express , Junky , Queer , The Yage Letters , The Ticket That Exploded , The Western Lands , The Place of Dead Roads , Wild Boys ), Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac ( Dharma Bums , Visions of Cody ), Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby Jr., William Blake, William Gibson, and J. G. Ballard. He has published articles about the Beat Generation and made documentaries about the Beats for Czech television and radio broadcasts, and has lectured at universities in Prague and elsewhere. Jennie Skerl is a founding board member and past president of the Beat Studies Association. She has published William S. Burroughs (Twayne 1985), William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959–1989 (co-edited with Robin Lydenberg, Southern Illinois UP 1991), A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles (Southern Illinois UP 1997), and Reconstructing the Beats (Palgrave 2004).

Load more