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).