Lee Kahan
Assistant Professor of English
Website: http://mypage.iusb.edu/~lkahan
Education
Ph.D. State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, English Literature, 2006
M.A. Eastern Kentucky University, English Literature/Rhetoric and Composition Studies, 1996
B.A. Averett University, English and Journalism/Communications, 1992
I arrived at IU South Bend in the fall of 2006, after teaching at Northeastern University in Boston. My specialty is the literature and culture of Britain in the long eighteenth century (1660-1830). This was a tumultuous period, during which Britain experienced a number of revolutions, both political and cultural: the removal of kings at home and abroad; the waning of aristocratic privilege and rise of a new middle class; and the separation of (male) public and (female) private spheres. In my classes, I want students to see not only how these revolutions were represented in literature but also how that literature took part in and helped to shape them.
My own research concentrates on the early days of the novel, which, along with the newspaper, was one of the new literary genres of the period. Right now, I’m hard at work on a book that examines how novelists used the commercial news writer as a foil against which to define themselves as impartial mediators of information, thereby attributing to the novel a valuable cultural role. I’m currently looking into how the historiography of the period might have provided a model for this new authorial persona.
Interests
Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture
British Romanticism
The History of the Novel
Media Theory
Courses Regularly Taught at IU South Bend
T190 Literary and Intellectual Traditions (Topic: Castaways)
L202 Literary Interpretation
L302 Literatures in English, 1600-1800
L329 Romanticism
L501 Professional Scholarship in Literature (Topic: New Historicism)
L631 English Literature, 1660-1790 (Topic: Politics of Grub Street)
For more information about me, click here to see my CV.
