Faculty Profile
Claire Seiler
(she/her/hers)Professor of English (2010)
Contact Information
East College Room 305
717-245-1921
Bio
Claire Seiler's research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary US, British, and Irish literatures; poetry and poetics; public health humanities and literary disability studies; and the history of literacy. She is the author of Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II (Columbia UP, 2020); of essays published or forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Twentieth-Century Literature, and other journals; and of book chapters in Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive (2020), The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English (2023), and other volumes. Seiler is currently at work on a literary history of polio and is editing the Cambridge Companion to Late Modernism. Her work has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. The latter funded the major institutional grant, Beyond the New Normal: Disability, Literature, and Reimagining Social Justice, that Seiler and Professor Alyssa DeBlasio (Russian) are co-directing through 2025.
Education
- B.A., Middlebury College, 2002
- M.Phil., Trinity College, Dublin, 2004
- Ph.D., Stanford University, 2010
Awards
- Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, 2019
- Dickinson Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2024
2025-2026 Academic Year
Fall 2025
ENGL 101 Feminist Genres
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-03. This course explores the centrality of literature and literacy to feminist thought, politics, imagination, and expression. We will consider how literacy itself has historically fostered feminist ideas and consciousness; explore how and why (mostly) twentieth-century US feminist writers approached and reimagined several literary genres and modes; and experiment genres ourselves, using creative and analytical written work to hone our own voices as writers and our grasp of feminist literary history. You can expect to emerge from this course with a solid grounding in the origins and contestations of feminist literary studies. You can also expect and to find yourself inspired-and challenged-by deep reading experiences of works across genres by Kate Chopin (novel of manners), bell hooks (essay), Dorothy B. Hughes (noir), Audre Lorde (journal), Toni Morrison (coming-of-age novel), and Virginia Woolf (essay), among others.
WGSS 101 Feminist Genres
Cross-listed with ENGL 101-03. This course explores the centrality of literature and literacy to feminist thought, politics, imagination, and expression. We will consider how literacy itself has historically fostered feminist ideas and consciousness; explore how and why (mostly) twentieth-century US feminist writers approached and reimagined several literary genres and modes; and experiment genres ourselves, using creative and analytical written work to hone our own voices as writers and our grasp of feminist literary history. You can expect to emerge from this course with a solid grounding in the origins and contestations of feminist literary studies. You can also expect and to find yourself inspired-and challenged-by deep reading experiences of works across genres by Kate Chopin (novel of manners), bell hooks (essay), Dorothy B. Hughes (noir), Audre Lorde (journal), Toni Morrison (coming-of-age novel), and Virginia Woolf (essay), among others.
FMST 220 Activist Media/Public Schlrshp
Cross-listed with ENGL 221-02. Many scholars and activists believe that “new” media democratize access to content creation and media production and distribution. Some would suggest that this has had the effect of rebalancing political and persuasive power. This class will experiment with a variety of tools in order to empower students to engage intentionally, meaningfully, and productively with a “public.” Working in small groups, students will be expected to produce an episode of a podcast, a video essay, and a digital project with the aim of translating big ideas into accessible forms, persuading the public to engage in meaningful reform, and/or activating a demographic to pursue social change. Discussions of course texts will compliment tutorial and exploratory work with different authoring platforms. Projects will be graded in critique, and students will be expected to create a portfolio of work for final submission.
FMST 220 Interactive Media
Cross-listed with ENGL 101-05. New media is considered distinctly interactive. In this class we will unpack and explore interactivity and the interactive, historically, culturally and aesthetically. We will work through a variety of media, from the obvious (video games, interactive films, choose your own adventure novels) to the less obvious (the novel, the art gallery, film). Interactivity, as a concept, will tie together a variety of objects and practices in this survey class. Ultimately, we will ask, what makes something interactive? How do passive and active media differ? What is the future of interactive media?
ENGL 321 Celtic Revival/Harlem Renaiss
This course studies two major art movements of the modernist period, both of which tie formal innovation to questions of national citizenship, racial equality, and political autonomy. How did these "minor" literatures challenge majority national or imperial cultures? What events and forms galvanized the social and aesthetic work of the Celtic Revival (Ireland) and the Harlem Renaissance (US)? Primary readings cover several genres (fiction, drama, poetry, and essays); primary authors include, among others: Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, J.M. Synge, Jean Toomer, and W.B. Yeats.