Professor Noah Chaskin (PhD Northwestern)
Chaskin’s research explores the representation and construction of femininity in the long eighteenth century from the perspective of queer theory and disability studies. Their scholarship considers the ways that narrative form and content interact in establishing narrative and cultural norms, showing that the structure of a given text might complicate or subvert that text’s apparent—or even stated—ideology.
Their work can be found in Women’s Writing, Modern Philology, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Their most recent chapter, “Ill Femininities and the Problems of Protagonism in Jane Austen’s Novels,” is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Disability and Literatures in English: 1700-1900 (2026). Professor Chaskin teaches disability studies and is invested in accessibility, inclusivity, and the principles of universal design in learning (UDL).
Professor Kalisha Cornett (PhD University of Chicago)
Cornett’s research is primarily concerned with the political and aesthetic representation of space in post-classical Hollywood Cinema. She is also interested in the influence of art, advertising, and mass culture on American cinema of the counterculture/Vietnam era. Her research focuses on the ways in which various aesthetic practices influenced emerging modes of American independent cinema of the 1970s. Her teaching interests include the history of Hollywood and genre theory.
Professor Sarah Dimick (PhD University of Wisconsin: Madison)
Dimick is jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture. Her research focuses on portrayals of climate change and environmental justice in contemporary global Anglophone literatures. Her first book, Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia University Press, 2024), examines how the environmental arrhythmias of an overheated world jar literary and cultural forms. Ranging from Marshallese spoken word poetry to Indian science writing to canonical American literature, Unseasonable argues that knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via the literary.
Dimick’s writing has appeared in journals including ISLE, Contemporary Literature, Post45: Contemporaries, Mosaic, and other venues. Her research has been supported by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, and the Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger. She currently serves as a co-editor for Under the Sign of Nature, a book series in the environmental humanities published by University of Virginia Press.