English Department Home Page

English Department Professor Bios

VALERIE ALLEN
Professor Allen received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Trinity College, Dublin.  She joined John Jay in 1999 having previously taught at the University of South Florida; the University of Stirling, Scotland; University College Dublin; Birkbeck College; and the University of London.  She publishes in the areas of medieval studies and of contemporary Continental philosophy, having co-edited New Casebooks: Chaucer (Houndmills, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1997) and most recently published on Friedrich Nietzsche and education.
 
MICHAEL BLITZ (THEMATIC STUDIES PROGRAM)
 
IRA BLOOMGARDEN
 
EFFIE PAPATZIKOU COCHRAN
Effie Papatzikou Cochran is an Associate Professor in the English Department.  She attained her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University and is an applied sociolinguist.  Her special interests consist of gender, dialects, and English grammar.  One of her recent achievements includes co-editing a book on gender, language learning, and classroom pedagogy.  She is currently editing a volume on the "mainstreaming" of ESL students.
 
WILLIAM COLEMAN (GRADUATE CENTER)
Professor William Coleman joined the English Department in 1970.  At John Jay, he has also taught in the Thematic Studies Program and helped develop a technical writing curriculum for the National Fire Academy.  He is currently the Deputy Executive Officer of the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature.
ROBERT E. CROZIER (CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH)
Trinity College, BA; Columbia University, MA, PhD. Author of recherche book reviews, both books and reviews well-forgotten, and hundreds of distinguished memos. Fully employed as a member of these committees: College Personnel & Budget, Council of Chairs, Executive Committee of the Council, Budget Committee, Comprehensive Planning Commission; Chair, Department Personnel & Budget Committee, Composition Committee, Phase II Committee; CUNY English Discipline Council.
 
EDWARD DAVENPORT
 
MARC DOLAN
Marc Dolan teaches Classical Literature, American Literature, and Representations of New York in Literature.  His teaching and research interests include the conceptualization of ethnicity and the history of mass entertainment in the United States.
 
P.J. GIBSON
 
ELISABETH GITTER (THEMATIC STUDIES PROGRAM)
Elisabeth Gitter, Professor of English, was a founding member of the Thematic Studies Program, an interdisciplinary liberal arts program in which she has taught for most of her career at John Jay College. A specialist in the Victorian period, she has published in a variety of journals, including Victorian Literature and Culture, Dickens Studies, and PMLA. In 1999 she won the Monroe Kirk Spears Award for the year's best essay in Studies in English Literature. Her biography of Laura Bridgman, The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May, 2001.
 
ANN A. HUSE
Ann A. Huse, Assistant Professor, received her B.A. at Amherst College and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis.  Her area of specialization is seventeenth-century British literature, particularly Milton, Dryden, Marvell, and Rochester. Her other interests include early modern women's writing, Anglo-French and Anglo-Irish literary relations and conflict, animals in literature, the literature of the Vietnam War, writing poetry, and pedagogy. She also holds a teaching credential in secondary school English and Social Studies and would be interested in speaking with any student considering a career in teaching. At John Jay, she teaches Literature 230 and 231; in her spare time, she is involved with veterans' groups and animal shelters.
 
LEE JENKINS
Lee Jenkins graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Fisk University with a B.A. in Philosophy and received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.  He resides in New York City with his wife and son.  He is a professor of English and a psychoanalyst, having trained at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), in affiliation with the Theodor Reik Consultation Center.  Jenkins has published extensively on Afro-American identity and the application of psychoanalysis to culture and literature.  Publications of interest include Faulkner and Black-White Relations: A Psychoanalytic Approach; African American Identity and its Social Context; Black-Jewish Relations: A Social and Mythic Alliance and Persistence of Memory: Poems.
 
KAREN KAPLOWITZ
Professor Karen Kaplowitz received her doctorate from New York University and her baccalaureate degree from Queens College/CUNY.  In addition to teaching the department’s literature courses, she created and taught courses in journalism, including a journalism workshop.
 
LIVIA KATZ
Professor Livia Katz received her M.A. in English from the CUNY Graduate School and Center, where she completed all her Ph.D. course work.  She has taught at John Jay since February 1978 and is currently the Director of the Writing Center.  Professor Katz teaches English 295 and 296, which train peer tutors for the Writing Center, the Intensive Writing Program and the Basic Skills Program.  As the Director of the Writing Center, she has expanded its services to include a series of skills and content oriented workshops conducted by English Department faculty and Writing Center staff.  Professor Katz has taught writing courses at all levels at John Jay College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Baruch College.
    E-mail: lkatz@jjay.cuny.edu        Writing Center web page: http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~writing
 
ERIC LARSEN
Eric Larsen graduated from Carleton College in 1963 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1971.  In that same year, he became a member of the English department at John Jay and has remained so since.  He has published two novels: An American Memory (1988) and I am Zoë Handke (1992), which were both brought out by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.  He has also published numerous essays, articles, reviews and pieces of short fiction in journals and magazines ranging from The South Dakota Review to The New Republic and Harper's.
 
PATRICIA M. LICKLIDER (Deputy Chair)
Professor Licklider, who has been at John Jay since 1970, received her MA and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.  She teaches classical literature, all levels of writing, and a graduate course for new teachers.  With now retired Professor Shirley Schnitzer, she founded and edited John Jay's Finest, an annual collection of outstanding student writing, and wrote Using Your WITs: Writing Instruction Tips for Teachers in All Disciplines.  Professor Licklider developed and ran the linkage program for entering freshman from 1986-1990 and the Intensive Writing Program for freshmen from 1996 to the present.  With Professor Michael Blitz, she currently conducts workshops for instructors who want to make their courses writing intensive, and her own literature courses stress writing.  Professor Licklider is active in various CUNY initiatives concerning writing instruction and assessment.  Her most recent book, to appear in June 2001, is Building an Active College Vocabulary, a text for beginning college students.  Currently, she is the Deputy Chair of the English Department and Director of Composition at John Jay.        Link: http://home.att.net/~plicklider
 
JOHN T. MATTESON
John T. Matteson has a B.A in History from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University.  He also holds a law degree from Harvard University.  In addition to being a former federal judicial clerk in the Eastern District of North Carolina, he spent four years as a labor litigator and is admitted to practice law in California and North Carolina.  His published work includes an essay on religious anxiety in Moby Dick and a number of short pieces on Walt Whitman.  His specialty is law and culture in 19th Century America, and he is at work on an article about the image of the sepulchre in literature during the Jacksonian period.  At John Jay, he teaches literature and legal writing.
 
ADAM McKIBLE
Professor McKible received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He teaches American and African American Literature, Classic Literature and Immigration Literature.
 
BARBARA ODABASHIAN
Professor Odabshian received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.  She has published in the area of Renaissance literature as well as Film Studies.  Professional Staff Congress Research Awards have supported her work.  Her most recent publication, “Portrait of an Artist: Hitchcock's Vertigo,” will appear in the Millennium issue of the Hitchcock Annual to commemorate the centenary of Alfred Hitchcock’s birth.  She has created and is Director of the Film Studies concentration in the English Department.  Professor Odabashian has developed and taught a wide variety of Film Studies courses at John Jay, including courses on Filmmakers, Film Genres, and Special Topics in Film.
 
ALLISON PEASE
Professor Allison Pease received her M.A. and her Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University.  She has published articles on British Victorian and Modern literature in the scholarly journals Criticism, Modernism/Modernity, and Victorian Poetry, and contributed a chapter to the book Reading Wilde: Querying Spaces, eds. Dever and Taylor (NYU Press, 1994).  Cambridge University Press published her book, Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity in 2000.
        Link: web.jjay.cuny.edu/~apease
 

CHARLES PILTCH

Charles Piltch, Associate Professor, has been at John Jay College since 1972.  He is a native Brooklynite and studied at Brooklyn College, John Hopkins and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he was among the first to earn the Ph.D. in English.  He was once a Miltonist and is now a rhetorician.  Though he has taught all the required writing and literature courses and several writing and literature electives, his primary teaching responsibility is English 250, Writing for Legal Studies, which he created.  In addition to teaching, he has had many administrative duties, especially concerning testing and curriculum development.
 
GILLIAN SILVERMAN
Gillian Silverman is an Assistant Professor in English at John Jay.  She did her undergraduate work at Brown University and at the Wilhelm Pieck University in Rostock, East Germany.  She received her Ph.D. from The Program in Literature at Duke University.  Her areas of interest include eighteenth and nineteenth century American Literature, cultural studies and gender studies.
 
TIMOTHY STEVENS
 
CHARLES STICKNEY
 
JON-CHRISTIAN SUGGS
Professor Jon-Christian Suggs is a professor of African American and American Literature in CUNY's doctoral program in English.  He is also coordinator of the Justice Studies major at John Jay.  He teaches Law and Literature, African American Literature and Justice Studies courses at John Jay.
 
MARGARET TABB
Margaret Tabb, Associate Professor of English, received her masters and doctoral degrees at the University of Toronto and Connecticut respectively, specializing in Renaissance English drama.  Along with a variety of required courses, she teaches a Shakespeare course that features traditional textual analysis and performance readings of plays by the students.
 
ANYA TAYLOR
Anya Taylor, Ph.D., has been Professor of English since 1979.  She
joined the faculty at John Jay in 1970.  She has published Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink 1780-1830 (Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1999); Coleridge: On Humanity (Macmillan and St. Martin's, 1994); Coleridge's Defense of the Human (Ohio State Univ.Press, 1986); and Magic and English Romanticism (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1979).  She has edited two volumes of The Wordsworth Circle on special topics: ”Criminal Justice” and “Romanticism” and “The Occult in Romanticism.”  Her articles have appeared in SEL, Studies in Romanticism, Essays in Literature, The Wordsworth Circle, Modern Language Quarterly, European Romantic Review, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language.  Since 1985 she has developed and taught the course “Literature and Alcohol,” one of the first such courses in the country.
 
MARIE UMEH
Dr. Umeh received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she was a graduate fellow in the Department of African Languages and Literatures, specializing in African women writers in the second half of the twentieth century.  The former Chair of the Department of English at Anambra State College of Education (Awka, Nigeria), Dr. Umeh has received PSC-CUNY awards and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Award in Feminist Theory and Literary Criticism.  At John Jay, she has taught Literatures of the African World, Research Methods, Writing Composition, Western Literatures and Modern Literature.  She has authored critical and theoretical essays that appear in journals and books throughout Africa, Europe and North America.  She is also the editor of two anthologies, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emechta (1996) and Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa (1998), published by Africa World Press.
 
CHRISTINE VARHOLY
 
ELIZABETH YUKINS
Dr. Yukins received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.  She specializes in twentieth-century American literature, with particular interests in critical race theory, women’s studies and law and literature.

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