Bio-sketch: Gary Lee Stonum
Gary Lee Stonum is the Oviatt Professor in the English Department of Case Western Reserve University , where he has taught for more than 30 years. For 11 years of this period he chaired the department, over 3 discontinuous terms. His current scholarly project is on modernist notions of authorship, more specifically the origins, motives, and contexts of the modernist enthusiasm for authorial impersonality
His scholarly work has been mainly in 19th and 20th century American literature and in literary theory. He has written books on William Faulkner ( William Faulkner's Career , Cornell UP) and on Emily Dickinson ( The Dickinson Sublime (U of Wisconsin P), and more than two dozen articles on various topics in American literature and literary theory. From 1999 through 2005 he edited The Emily Dickinson Journal , and he was one of the founding board members of its parent organization, the Emily Dickinson International Society. Along with Martha Woodmansee , he helped bring the Society for Critical Exchange to Case, and for its first five years there served with her as co-director. During that time he founded and ran the Electronic College of Theory, one of the first internet sites in literary studies. Prior to that, along with some now departed colleagues, he organized and ran Bellflower (previously Arete) Press, the only departmentally based publisher of humanities monographs in the United States . For about ten years he was a regular book reviewer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer , mostly reviewing new literary fiction, author biographies, and the occasional scholarly work deemed of sufficiently wide interest. He has also been a regular contributor to the annual volumes of American Literary Scholarship as the author, at various times, of the chapters on “Whitman and Dickinson” and on “Themes, Topics, Criticism.”
Stonum teaches courses in American literature, modernist and postmodernist literature, African-American literature, narrative, literary theory, and composition. Less regularly he has also taught courses on Victorian literature, lyric poetry, and the novel. He has directed more than a dozen dissertations, mostly on modern American and African-American literature. He has twice been among the finalists for the university's Wittke award for distinguished undergraduate teaching. One of the pioneers of the use of computers in teaching the humanities, particularly with local newsgroups, email lists, and other equivalents of what are now usually known as a chat rooms, he is also the author of a fairly skeptical article on the instructional uses of computers.
Stonum's degrees are from Reed College (BA, 1969) and Johns Hopkins (M.A. and Ph.D, 1971 and 1973). He has taught at CWRU since 1973, including one year as a visiting professor at UC-Irvine. He is a past president of the College English Association of Ohio, and while department chair he was active in the Association of Departments of English.
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