DR. NANCY EASTERLIN

University Research Professor
Ph.D., Temple University, 1991
M.A., University of Denver,1983
B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1978

Dr. Easterlin has been an active member of the UNO English Department since 1991. She teaches, directs theses, and produces scholarship in four major areas: British Romanticism; Prose Fiction; Literary Criticism and Theory; and Women’s Studies. Her courses in romanticism pair canonical male and female poets sharing thematic, aesthetic, political, and historical concerns. Dr. Easterlin’s courses in fiction typically focus on the work of postcolonial, Commonwealth, and women writers; Tales Told and Retold, a special topics course, pairs nineteenth and twentieth century canonical works with recent retellings (e.g., Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea). In Spring 2007, Dr. Easterllin designed and taught Sex, Power, and the Short Story, an interdisciplinary course that combines feminist theory, evolutionary research on sex differences, and short fiction. When she teaches Literary Theory, a graduate-level course, Dr. Easterlin gives a broad overview of developments since 1900, including evolutionary and cognitive approaches, the area in which she specializes, in the last weeks of the course.

Dr. Easterlin’s major scholarly area is cognitive and evolutionary approaches to literature. An interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Easterlin engages with research in the sciences and social sciences (most particularly various subdisciplines of psychology) to illuminate literature and to refine literary theory. Her current book project,  What Is Literature For? Biocultural Theory and Interpretation, demonstrates the utility of broad-based evolutionary and cognitive knowledge for a range of literary specializations.

In 2008, Dr. Easterlin was selected for a University of New Orleans Research Professorship and for a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the current book project and to promote her future interdisciplinary literary endeavors.

Selected Publications:

Books:

Wordsworth and the Question of “Romantic Religion” (Bucknell, 1996)

After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, ed. with Barbara Riebling (Northwestern, 1993)

Special issues of journals:

Special editor, twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Philosophy and Literature on cognitive and evolutionary approaches, 25.2, 2001

Recent articles:

“Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation”; forthcoming in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine, Johns Hopkins

“How to Write the Great Darwinian Novel: Cognitive Predispositions, Cultural Complexity, and Aesthetic Evaluation”; Journal of Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology 3.1, 2005

“’Loving Ourselves Best of All’: Ecocriticism and the Adapted Mind”; Mosaic 37.3, 2004

“Hans Christian Anderson’s Fish out of Water”; Philosophy and Literature 25.2, 2001

“Voyages in the Verbal Universe: The Role of Speculation in Darwinian Literary Criticism”; Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2.2, 2001

“Psychoanalysis and ‘The Discipline of Love’”; Philosophy and Literature 24.2, 2000

“Making Knowledge: Bioepistemology and the Foundations of Literary Theory”; Mosaic 32.1, 1999; reprinted in Theory’s Empire, ed. Daphne Patai and Will Corral, Columbia 2005

“Do Cognitive Predispositions Predict or Determine Literary Value Judgments? Narrativity, Plot, and Aesthetics”; in Biopoetics, ed. Brett Cooke and Fred Turner, Paragon House, 1999

Phone Number:
(504) 280-6384

Email Dr. Easterlin@
neasterl@uno.edu

Address: Liberal Arts Building 317

Office Hours:

MW 12:15-2:00pm
W 10:00am-12:00pm

Engl 4378-001:
Sex, Power and the Short Story
MW 11:00am-12:15pm