WENDY KOLMAR, DEPT. CHAIR
Title: Department Chair, Professor of English,
Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Office: Sitterly House 106
Phone: 973-408-3632
Email: [email protected]
Education: AB, Bryn Mawr College, 1972; PhD, Indiana University, 1992
Biography: Wendy Kolmar is Professor of English and of Women’s and Gender Studies. She teaches courses on feminist theory and the history of feminist thought, Victorian literature, women and literature, gothic and supernatural literature, film and literary criticism. She serves regularly as a consultant and reviewer for women’s and gender studies programs around the country and also served for many years on various governing bodies of the National Women’s Studies Association. Her publications include Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women (with Lynette Carpenter — 1991); Creating an Inclusive College Curriculum: A Teaching Source Book from the New Jersey Project (edited with Ellen G. Friedman, Charley B. Flint, and Paula Rothenberg — 1996); A Selected Annotated Bibliography of Ghost Stories by British and American Women Writers (with Lynette Carpenter — 1998); Feminist Theory: A Reader (with Fran Batkowski, now in its second edition) and a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly, entitled Looking Across the Lens: Women’s Studies and Film.
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SUMMER HARRISON
Title: Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies & Sustainability
Office: Sitterly House 303
Phone: 973-408-3217
Email: [email protected]
Education: BA, Texas A&M University, 2002; MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005; PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012
Biography: Summer Harrison is an Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies & Sustainability. Her teaching and research interests include environmental and social justice, ecocriticism, narrative, gender studies, nonhuman personhood, energy humanities, community-based learning, and contemporary American literatures. At Drew, she teaches courses in food justice and U.S. literature, nature writing, environmental justice, ecocriticism, gender and contemporary literature, American Indian literature and film, and multiethnic U.S. literature. Recent publications include “Mountaintop Removal Mining Fiction: Energy Humanities and Environmental Injustice,” published in Appalachian Journal, and “’We Need New Stories’: Trauma, Storytelling, and the Mapping of Environmental Injustice in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Standing Rock,” which appears in American Indian Quarterly. In her spare time, she likes drawing and adventure walking.
SHAKTI JAISING
Title: Professor of English; Director, Film Studies
Office: Sitterly House 204
Phone: 973-408-3915
Email: [email protected]
Education: BA, University of Mumbai; MA, University of Florida; MFA (Film and Media Arts), Temple University; PhD, Rutgers University.
Biography: Shakti Jaising’s research and teaching engage with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone literatures, film studies, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial and globalization studies. Her book Beyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script (2023) is part of the Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines series, published by Liverpool University Press. Focusing on literature and film from contemporary India, and departing from assumptions of alterity and difference that typically inform approaches to the formerly colonized world, the book draws attention to continuities produced by global capitalism’s structuring of consciousness and subjectivity across the North-South divide. Jaising’s scholarly writing has also appeared in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literatures. Her new research investigates the material and cultural impact of streaming services like Netflix, particularly on media ecosystems of the global South.
SANDRA JAMIESON
Title: Professor of English, Director of Writing Across the Curriculum
Office: Sitterly House 306
Phone: 973-408-3499
Email: [email protected]
Education: BA, University at East Anglia, 1981; MA, 1986; PhD, Binghamton University, 1991.
Biography: Sandra Jamieson specializes in writing and communication studies and directs Drew’s Undergraduate Writing Fellows program. She teaches courses on social media, digital writing, authorship, genres of writing, creative nonfiction, tutoring and teaching writing, and civic engagement, and has led travel programs to Argentina and Cuba, and service trips to Honduras and the Dominican Republic. A principal researcher in the national study of student writing, the Citation Project, she has published many articles and book chapters in addition to The Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines, and three co-edited collections, Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum (2000), Information Literacy: Research and Collaboration across Disciplines (2016), and Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods (2018). She has held office in two major writing studies organizations, and regularly lectures and runs workshops on plagiarism and information literacy on college campuses and presents papers at professional conferences in the US and abroad.
Website: sandrajamieson.net
NEIL LEVI
Title: Professor of English
Office: Sitterly House 308
Phone: 973-408-3821
Email: [email protected]
Education: BA, University of Western Australia; MA, Columbia University; MPhil, Columbia University; PhD, Columbia University
Biography: Neil Levi specializes in twentieth century British and comparative literature, critical theory, and Holocaust Studies. He is the author of Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification (Fordham UP, 2014), and co-edited, with Michael Rothberg, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh University Press/Rutgers University Press, 2003) and a special issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature on “Jewish Studies and the Jewish Question After Trump” (2020). With Tim Dolin he co-edited a special issue of Australian Cultural History, entitled Antipodean Modern. Forthcoming articles in Historical Materialism (on Moishe Postone) and Rethinking Marxism (on Bertolt Brecht). Other recent publications include: “How To Do Things With Modernism,” in Modernism/Modernity, Volume 3, Cycle 4, December 2018; “Memory studies in a moment of danger: Fascism, postfascism, and the contemporary political imaginary, ”Memory Studies 2018, Vol. 11(3) 355–367 (with Michael Rothberg); and “The Persistence of the Old Regime: Late Modernist Form in the Postmodern Period,” in Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, edited by Stephen Ross (Routledge, 2009). He has also published articles in the journals Symploke, New German Critique, History and Memory, OCTOBER, Textual Practice, and Idealistic Studies. His first play, Kin, won the 2015 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award.
JENS LLOYD
Title: Assistant Professor, Director of First-Year Writing
Office: Sitterly House 205
Phone: 973-408-3802
Email: [email protected]
Education: BA, University of Washington, 2009; MA, UC Irvine, 2012; PhD, UC Irvine, 2018.
Biography: Specializing in composition theory and pedagogy, Jens Lloyd has a particular interest in place-based approaches to research and teaching. Other interests include writing program administration, histories and theories of rhetoric, travel writing, and young adult fiction. His scholarly writing appears in Rhetoric Review, Literacy in Composition Studies, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, and Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, as well as in Bordered Writers: Latinx Identities and Literacy Practices at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, an edited collection from SUNY Press. His favorite tree on campus is conveniently located right outside his office window.
LISA LYNCH
Title: Associate Professor of Media and Communications and Director of the Program in Media and Communication and the New York
Semester on Media and Communication
Office: Sitterly 208
Phone: 973-408-3300
Email: [email protected]Education: BA, Stanford, 1982; MJ, University of California at Berkeley, 1990; PhD, Rutgers University, 2000.
Biography: Prof. Lynch’s research is situated at the intersection between culture, technology, and political change, focusing on topics including new media, literature and technology, information access, global internet governance issues, and human rights. Her academic writing has appeared in journals including American Literature, Literature and Medicine, New Formations, and Radical History Review, and her research has been written about in publications ranging from Kill Screen to Al Jazeera. Most recently, she has been writing about document leaking and the circulation of leaked information, including chapters in the volumes “Beyond Wikileaks” and “Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives” as well as articles in Digital Journalism, Radical History Review, Journalism Practice, and the International Journal of Online Communication. During fall semester 2014, she was a fellow at Princeton’s Center For Information Technology Policy, researching Net Neutrality and Google’s response to Europe’s Right To Be Forgotten legislation. Currently, she is an affiliate at New York’s Data and Society Institute. Her book Native Advertising: Digital Disruptions in the 21st Century News Feed was published by Routledge in 2018.
JACOB SOULE
Title: Assistant Teaching Professor
Office: Sitterly House 305
Phone: 973-408-3954
Education: BA, University of York; MPhil, University of Cambridge; PhD, Duke University.
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Jacob Soule is Assistant Teaching Professor of English. His teaching and research interests include modern and contemporary Anglophone literatures (particularly the novel), critical theory, urban studies and the environmental humanities more broadly. He has taught courses on genre fiction and film, cities in literature, nature and environmental writing, and literary and cultural theory. His scholarly writing has appeared in Contemporary Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, in addition to Liquidity, Flows, Circulation: The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization, an edited collection published by The University of Chicago Press.
HANNAH WELLS
Title: Associate Professor of English
Office: Sitterly House 201
Phone: 973-408-3903
Email: [email protected]
Education: BA, University of Chicago, 1998; MA, University of Pennsylvania, 2006; PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2009
Biography: Hannah Wells is a scholar of American literature, culture, and philosophy. Her teaching and research interests include law and literature, African American literature, political philosophy, pragmatism, and the history of science. She is currently at work on a book called American Pragmatism and the Color Line, which explores the racial and material histories out of which pragmatist philosophy emerged as well as pragmatism’s vexed use value for writers like Henry James and W.E.B. Du Bois. Her articles appear in American Literature and The Henry James Review. Before coming to Drew, Hannah was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. She has also taught at Stanford, the Cooper Union, and the University of Pennsylvania.
COURTNEY ZOFFNESS

Office: Sitterly House 304
Phone: 973-408-3819
Email: [email protected]
Education: B.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.A. The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University; M.F.A. University of Arizona
Biography: Courtney Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest international prize for short fiction. She also received the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize and the American Literary Review Fiction Prize, and her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The Southern Review, Longreads, The Rumpus, The Common, Los Angeles Review of Books, and McSweeney’s Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement. She has been honored with an Emerging Writers Fellowship from The Center for Fiction, residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, and a notable essay in Best American Essays 2018. Courtney has taught at a range of institutions, from Yale University to the University of Freiburg in Germany. At Drew, she teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and contemporary American literature, and directs the Creative Writing Program.
Faculty Emeriti
Janet Handler Burstein, Professor of English, 1970-2004
Frank Occhiogrosso, Professor of English
John M. Warner, Professor of English, 1962-2000
In Memorium
Jacqueline Berke Professor of English, 1959-1993
John W. Bicknell Professor of English, 1954-1978