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Associate Dean, College of Arts and Letters & Professor
white2se@jmu.edu
Contact Info

Office: Harrison 1102

Fall 2023 Office Hours:
Wednesdays, 1:00-2:30pm

Professor

Courses Taught:
ENG 221.H: The Rebel and the Artist in Modern Irish Literature
ENG 221H: Knowing and Telling: How Narratives Produce Knowledge in Northern Ireland
ENG 236: Survey of British Literature, 1798-Present
ENG 299: Writing About Literature
ENG 302: Special Topics in Literature: Irish Modernism
ENG 302: “The Modernist Tragedy: Narrative Theory, Aristotelian Unities & The Novel of One day”
ENG 302: The Modernist Tragedy: Narrative Theory, Aristotelian Unities & The Novel of One Day
ENG 331: Modern Poetry
ENG 340: Modern British and Irish Literature
ENG 375: Troubled Ireland in Literature and Film
ENG 375: Advanced Studies in Irish & Anglo Irish Literature: Stories of Northern Ireland and the Irish Border
ENG 410: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury and Feminism
ENG 612: Topics in Theory and Cultural Studies – Narrative Theory
ENG 645: Studies in 20th- and 21st-c British Literature: “Postcolonial Ireland in the Long 20th century”
ENG 645: Studies in 20th- and 21st-c British Literature: “Autonomous Selfhood, Under Threat: Alienation in British and Irish Modernism”
ENG 645: Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century British Literature: “Modernist Narratives”
HON 200: Honors Seminar in London – The Bloomsbury Group

Specialization:
Modern British and Irish Literature, Modernism, Irish Studies, Gender Studies, Narrative Theory

EDUCATION
Ph.D., English, University of Notre Dame (2009)
         Dissertation: “Intimate Modernities: British and Irish Literature, 1922-1955”
M.A., English, Loyola Marymount University (2002)
B.A., cum laude and Honors, English, minor in Spanish, UCLA (1998)

ADDITIONAL SEMINARS, PROGRAMS AND INSTITUTES
Entrepreneurial Faculty Fellows Program, James Madison University (2017-2019)
Digital Humanities and Social Sciences Institute, James Madison University (Fall 2014, 2017)
Project Narrative Summer Institute, The Ohio State University (Summer 2010)
School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University (Summer 2007)
Summer Seminars, Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies (2003-2006)
Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain (1996-1997)

PUBLICATIONS

Book
The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism, co-editor with Maud Ellmann and Vicki Mahaffey (Edinburgh UP, May 2021).

Articles & Book Chapters

 “A ‘Hair-Trigger Society’ and the Woman Who Felt Something in Anna Burns’s Big, Ambitious Milkman (2018),” Special Issue: “Big, Ambitious Novels by 21st Century Women,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 54.1 (2021): 111-137.

 My chapter: “‘Stories Are A Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction,” The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism, 351-367.

The Dramatic Modern Novel: Mimesis and The Poetics of Tragedy in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf Studies Annual 24 (2018): 101-34.

Spatial Politics/Poetics, Late Modernism and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 49.1 (2016): 27-50.

Ulysses, the Poetics of Tragedy, and A New Mimesis.” PLL: Papers on Language and Literature 51.4 (2015): 334-72.

An Aesthetics of Unintimacy: Narrative Complexity in Elizabeth Bowen’s Style.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 45.1 (Winter 2015), 79-104.

“‘O, despise not my youth!’: Senses, Sympathy, and an Intimate Aesthetics in Ulysses.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51.4 (Winter 2009): 503-536.

 “Warming the Other Side: Trevor, Cixous, and Facing a New Direction.” New Voices 5. Ed. Ruth Connolly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). 224-231.

Edited Journal Issues
Co-editor and author of “Introduction” with Dr. Pamela Thurschwell, Special Issue, “Elizabeth Bowen and Textual Modernity,” Textual Practice 27.1 (January 2013): 1-192.

Non-Refereed Digital Publication
Networked Woolf (formerly Woolf in Time and Space), Digital Humanities website (designer, editor and producer with students in Eng 410 seminar), Spring 2015-Present

SELECTED GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS
Professional Development Grant, Madison Caucus for Gender Equality, JMU (2021)
CAL Research Grant, JMU (2019)
International Development Grant, Center for Global Engagement, JMU (2018)
Faculty Summer Research Grant, College of Arts & Letters, JMU (2017)
Edna T. Shaeffer Humanist Award, James Madison University (2013-2014)
Faculty Summer Research Grant, College of Arts & Letters, JMU (2010)
Summer Scholarship Grant, English Department, JMU (2010)
Teaching Grant for Course Development, General Education Program, JMU (2010)
International Development Grant, Office of International Programs, JMU (2010)

SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS:

Panel Organizer for “Between Longing and Threat: Forms of Modernist Closeness”; Paper presented: “Narrative and Affective Strangeness in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day,” Modernist Studies Association Conference, Toronto, Oct 2019

Roundtable Organizer for “Irish Modernisms,” Modernist Studies Association Conference, Toronto, Oct 2019

 “Reproducing Sacrifice: the Irish Female Body in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing” on panel entitled, “Textual Transactions, Sexual Transactions: Economic Bodies, Social Reproduction, and Texts,” Modern Language Association, Chicago, IL, January 2019

“Eimear McBride’s Anti-Room” on panel entitled, “Domestic Interiors and Exteriors in 19th- and 20thc-century Irish Writing,” American Conference for Irish Studies, University College Cork, Ireland, June 2018

Roundtable Panelist, “Elizabeth Bowen,” American Conference for Irish Studies, University College Cork, Ireland, June 2018

Poetry Panelist, “Paula Meehan,” American Conference for Irish Studies, University of Missouri, March 2017

“Modernism Unfinished: The Female Subject in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013),” American Conference for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, Mar-April 2016

Poetry Panelist, “Eavan Boland,” American Conference for Irish Studies, University of Miami, March 2015

“Blocking Bodies: Dramatic Staging in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” International James Joyce Conference, College of Charleston, 2013 June 11-15

“The Modernist Tragedy: Aristotelian Unities and Ulysses,” 18th Irregular Miami J’yce Birthday Conference: Joyce and England, University of Miami, 2013 January 31-February

“‘[T]he eyes that reached her heart’: Visual Intimacy in ‘Nausicaa’,” XXII International James Joyce Symposium, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, 2010 June.

“Expanding Points of View, Collapsing Spaces: Gender in Mrs. Dalloway,” Gender, Place and Space: An Interdisciplinary Conference, University  of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2010 March.

“Intimate Aesthetics in Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish Novels,” Keynote Address, Reading Elizabeth Bowen, Symposium at the Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex, 2009 May.

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