Louise Yelin, Ph.D.

Professor of Literature
Chair, School of Humanities

Office: 2010 Humanities Building
Tel: (914) 251-6563
Fax: (914) 251-6559
E-mail: louise.yelin@purchase.edu

Louise Yelin is a professor of literature in the School of Humanities and also participates in the interdisciplinary gender studies program. She is currently working on a book, British Lives: Windrush to Parekh, about autobiography and self-portraiture in Britain since the Second World War. In 2009, she curated the exhibition British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning 1967–2009 at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

Dr. Yelin has taught at Purchase since 1980. In 1997, she won the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. She was appointed chair of the School of Humanities in July 2010, after serving as its interim dean from July 2008 through June 2010.

Education
A.B., 1967, Bryn Mawr College
M.A., 1969, Columbia University
Ph.D., 1977, Columbia University

Areas of expertise
Postcolonial studies; the novel; autobiography and self-portraiture; feminism; 20th-century British culture.

Research interests
contemporary literature and culture; autobiography and self-portraiture.

Courses taught
Literature of the Middle Passage (fall, 2007)
Contemporary Literatures in English: Multicultural Britain and Postcolonial Global Culture
Feminism and Culture
British Culture and Society since 1918 (team-taught with a historian)
Politics and Writing in an Age of Crisis: 1918- (team-taught with a historian)
Colloquium II: Advanced Studies in Literature: The Modern Literature of Memory
Colloquium I: The Novel
College Writing: Writing, Memory, and History

Selected honors and awards
Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching
Kempner Distinguished Professorship
President’s Junior Faculty Award
Faculty Development Awards
Dickens Society Award

Publications

Books

From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. (Cornell University Press, 1998.)

Selected Recent Essays

“Plural Selves: The Dispersion of the Autobiographical Subject in the Essays of Caryl Phillips.” In Caryl Phillips: 25 Years of Writing, ed. Bénédicte Ledent. Forthcoming, Rodopi, 2008.

“Living State-side: Caryl Phillips and the United States.” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing 7, 1 (2007): 85-102.

“Our Broken Word: Fred d’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, and the Slave Ship Zong.” In Revisiting Slave Narratives / Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves, ed. Judith Misrahi-Barak.  Collection “Les Carnets du Cerpac” 2. Université de Montpellier  III, 2005: 349-63.

“Divided Loyalties: Iris Origo’s War in Val d’Orcia.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. 20, 1 (2005 [2006]): 1-18.

“In Another Place: Postcolonial Perspectives on Reading.” In Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart. NY: MLA, 2004. 83-107.

“Globalizing Subjects.” Essay on women and globalization in a special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society on Development Cultures: New Environments, New Realities, New Strategies. 29, 2 (2004): 439-64.