David Palumbo, PhD

Assistant Professor of English
B.M., Vanderbilt University; M.A., State University of New York, Buffalo; Ph.D., Tufts University

Office hours:
M-12:00pm-2:00pm; 
T—9:45am-10:45am
Or by appointment

Office: TBA
Phone: TBA
Email: palumbda2@emmanuel.edu

I defended my dissertation, entitled Swift's Dirty Secrets: Epistemology in the Eighteenth Century, on 6 June 2006 and I'm currently working on two articles (" 'That's So Funny I Forgot to Laugh': Satiric Mistranslation in Defoe's The Shortest Way With The Dissenters and Swift's A Modest Proposal" and "Reading Between the Lies: Wollstonecraft's Re-Reading of History's Project") derived from that project. Last year, I presented two papers at academic conferences—one at the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (NEASECS) and another at the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS)—and this year I plan to present at the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SEASECS) in February and at ASECS in March. Beyond my interests in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Studies, I enjoy reading and thinking about Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century English culture, specifically the dramatic, poetic, and political aspects of that culture. And my work on the "the novel" expands my interests into the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British culture of conquest and empire.

My primary theoretical interests lie in two strains of "post-structuralism": 1) deconstruction, especially the work of Barbara Johnson, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man, and 2) postcolonialism, especially the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. In each of these theoretical approaches, I value the attention paid to "otherness," whether that term suggests an interest in the problematics of difference relating to race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, or an interest in the difference one experiences in one's own identity through understanding the various and potentially problematic ways human subjects align themselves with groups and belief systems that are simultaneously inclusive and exclusive. I look forward to pursuing these ideas in my Fall 2007 semester, during which I will teach the following classes:

Fall 2007 Classes

FYS 1101—39 Periodical Culture: Then & Now (MWF 11:00am-11:50am)

ENGL 1208-4 Persuasive Strategies (MW 4:15pm-5:30pm)

ENGL 2417  Literature of the Black Atlantic (TR 10:50am-12:05pm)