Janet Casey

Associate Dean of the Faculty for Diversity and Faculty Affairs and Professor of english

• B.A., College of the Holy Cross
• M.A. and Ph.D., University of Delaware

Office: Palamountain 416
Phone: (518) 580-5705
Email: jcasey@skidmore.edu

Teaching and Research Interests:

• Modern American Literature and Culture
• Ideologies of Class and Gender
• History and Theory of Leftist Literature
• Middlebrow Modernisms

Courses Taught:

• AM 260:  American Bestsellers and Popular Culture
• AM 376:  Magazines and Modernity
• EN 105:  Class Matters
• EN 110:  Introduction to Literary Studies
• EN 227:  Introduction to African American Literature
• EN 323:  American Literary Realism
• EN 324:  American Fictions
• EN 325:  American Modernisms
• EN 363:  Literature, Class, and Culture
• SSP 100:  Human Dilemmas
• SSP 100: Classless Society

Selected Publications:

Books:

• (Ed.) Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom (Iowa UP, 2015).
• A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America (Oxford UP, 2009).
• (Ed.) The Novel and the American Left:  Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction (Iowa UP, 2004).
• Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine (Cambridge UP, 1998).

Articles and Book Chapters:

• "The Country: Myth and Reality, Affirmation and Reform." American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920, ed. Mark W. Van Wienen. Cambridge UP, 2017 [Invited.]
• "Introduction:" Reading, Pedagogy, and Tainted Lit." Teaching Tainted Lit, ed. Casey. Iowa UP, 2015.
• "American Literary Realism: Popularity and Politics in a Modernist Frame." A History of the Modernist Novel, ed. Gregory Castle. Cambridge UP, 2015. [Invited.] 
• "Class Relations and the Politics of Representation." Classless Society [exhibition catalog]. Tang Teaching Museum, 2015.
• “Realism and the Discursive Dynamics of the Popular Periodical, 1900-1929.” Mosaic 46.2 (June 2013): 123-45.
• “The American Pioneer Woman Circa 1930: Cultural Debates and the Role of Public Art.” American Studies 51 (2010): 85-107. [Released in summer 2012]
• “Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy.” Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960, ed. Erica Brown and Mary C. Grover. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2011): 25-36.  [Invited.]
• “Canon Issues and Class Contexts: Teaching American Literature from a Market Perspective.” Radical Teacher 86 (Winter 2009): 18-27. Rpt. in Class and the College Classroom: Essays on Teaching, ed. Robert C. Rosen. New York: Bloomsbury (2013): 169-78. Rpt. in Class and the College Classroom: Essays on Teaching, ed. Robert C. Rosen.  New York: Bloomsbury (2013): 169-78.                                                                                     
• “Dis/Locating the Radical in The Grapes of Wrath.” The Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration, ed. Michael Meyer. 2 vols. Rodopi Press, 2009. 290-307.

Museum Exhibition:

• Classless Society, co-curated with M. Odekon, R. Seligman, and J. Weber.  Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Sept. 2013-March 2014.  Catalog published 2015.  Website: https://tang.skidmore.edu/app/public/webroot/files/uploads/classless_society/index.html

Selected Awards:

• Gita Chaudhuri Book Prize, Western Association of Women Historians (for A New Heartland).
• Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2003-04.  
• Modern Language Association Book Prize for Independent Scholars (for Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine).