faculty advisors
KRISTINA BROSSAssociate Professor, Department of English
Associate Dean For Research & Creative Endeavors, Honors College Ph.D., English, University of Chicago, 1997 Prof. Bross completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1997 and held an appointment at California Polytechnic State University until 1999, when she joined the Purdue faculty. She has chapters in several collections of essays, and has published in the print journal Early American Literature and Common-place, an on-line journal of early American culture. Undergraduate courses include courses on early American literature, archival research, historical fiction and science fiction. Graduate offerings include courses on colonial identities, early Native American writers, captivity narratives, early Caribbean literature in English, and violence in American literature. Her books include Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Cornell 2004), examines the so-called "Praying Indian" figure in transatlantic mission literature and the construction of English national and colonial identities in the 17th-century and Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (U Mass, 2008, co-edited with Hilary Wyss). Her current work is a book-length project on the relationship of New England to Cromwell's Western Design. |
RYAN SCHNEIDERAssociate Professor, Department of English
Ph.D., Duke University, 1998 Prof. Schneider earned a B.A. in History and Literature, magna cum laude, from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Duke University. Before he came to Purdue, he was an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Prof. Schneider has published articles in the journals American Transcendental Quarterly and Arizona Quarterly as well as essays in the edited collections No More Separate Spheres!: A Next Wave American Studies Reader, (Duke University Press) and Boys Don't Cry?: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in America (Columbia University Press). His reviews appear in Modern Language Quarterly, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and American Book Review. He also has contributed essays to The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States and W.E.B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia. His book, The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois: Emotional Dimensions of Race and Reform, is the third title in Palgrave Macmillan’s series on Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. |
CHRISTOPHER LUKASIKAssociate Professor, Department of English and American Studies
Ph.D., English, Johns Hopkins University, 2002 Professor Lukasik joined Purdue University in the Fall of 2005. Prior to his appointment at Purdue, he was an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Boston University, where he also served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for American Studies. He earned his B.A. in English and B.F.A. in Painting at the University of Illinois and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins University. Professor Lukasik has published essays in Studies in American Fiction, Common-place, Amerikiastudien/American Studies, Early American Literature, New England Quarterly and Blackwell’s A Companion to American Fiction. His book, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2010 as part of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies book series. His next book, The Image In the Text: Intermediality, Illustration, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, provides a cultural history of illustration that synthesizes literary, book, and art history with theoretical work from visual and media studies. |
MANUSHAG (NUSH) POWELLAssociate Professor, Department of English
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English Ph.D., 2006, UCLA Professor Manushag (Nush) Powell joined the Purdue University English department in the fall of 2007, coming from a visiting assistant professor position at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her research interests include the rise of the professional author in England, periodical and essay writing, British women writers, gender and authorship, genre and literature, performance and literature, and pirates. Her teaching interests are in British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, genre and culture, novels and other forms of prose writing, British drama, gothic writing, literature about pirates, and (most recently) dragons. Professor Powell earned her Ph.D. (2006) and MA (2003) in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her BA in English from Yale University in 1999. Her first book, Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals, was published in 2012 as part of the Transits: Literature, Thought, & Culture 1650-1850 series at Bucknell University Press and released in paperback in 2014. Her second book, written with Frederick Burwick, is British Pirates in Print and Performance (Palgrave, 2015). She has recently published with Jennie Batchelor an unprecedented collection of essays on women’s periodicals in the eighteenth century (Edinburgh, 2018), and is currently working on a Broadview Press edition of Captain Singleton, by Daniel Defoe. |
Derek PachecoAssociate Professor, Department of English
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of English Ph.D., 2006, UCLA Associate Professor of English at Purdue University, where he’s taught since 2008, Prof. Pacheco received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2006. His research and teaching interests include: transcendentalism; children’s literature; antebellum print culture; race, class, and gender in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. His latest book, Moral Enterprise (Ohio State, 2013), uses the transcendentalists to examine an ethically redemptive and potentially lucrative definition of antebellum author as educator. He is now working on a second book about transcendentalism, romanticism, and nineteenth-century children’s literature. Professor Pacheco has recently taught courses such as Ways of Reading; Survey of American Literature to 1865; Gender and Literature; Literature for Children; Transatlantic Children’s Literature; The American Novel; Hawthorne; Antebellum American Literature; Courtship and Captivity: the Transatlantic Novel (with Professor Powell); and Later Nineteenth-Century American Literature (with Professor Schneider). |