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Department of English & Language Arts


Department Leadership

Dr. Adele Newson-Horst 

Interim Chair, Professor & Director of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies , Department of English and Language Arts

Office: Holmes Hall 218/219
Phone: 443-885-3978
Adele.NewsonHorst @morgan.edu

Education:

Michigan State University: PhD, Eastern Michigan University: M.A., Spellman College: B.A.

Areas of Specialization: African American Literature; 20th Century African American Women's Literature; Caribbean Literature; Black Feminism & Quare Studies 

Teaching Areas: African American Literature & Culture; 20th Century African American Women Novelists; Caribbean Literature; Black Feminism & Quare Studies 

Publications:

Editor, The Essential Nawal El Saadawi: A Reader, London, ZepPublishers, 2010

Dr. L. Adam Mekler 

Adam Mekler

Associate Chair, Department of English and Language Arts & Associate Professor , Department of English and Language Arts

Office: Holmes Hall 228
Phone: 443-885-4032
Adam.Mekler@morgan.edu

Education:

Drew University: MA, MPhil, PhD, English Literature

University of Delaware: BA, English Education

Areas of Specialization: British Romantic Literature; African American Literature
Teaching Areas: British Romantic Literature; Literary Theory; Feminist and Psychoanalytic Theory; African American Literature

Books

Mekler, L. Adam, and Lucy Morrison, editors. Mary Shelley: Her Circle and Her Contemporaries. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010.


Book Chapters
“Playing Devil’s Advocate: Defending the Criminal Justice System in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Frankenstein and STEAM: Essays for Charles E. Robinson, edited by Robin Hammerman, University of Delaware Press, 2022, pp. 104-24.

“Hideous Progenies: Mary Shelley, John Polidori, and Incest in the Godwinian Novel.”
Mekler and Morrison 45-61.

“‘Altered by a thousand distortions’: Dream-Work in Mary Shelley’s Early Novels.” CEA-MAGazine. 16 (2003): 38-49. Rpt. in Modern Critical Views: Mary Shelley. Ed. Harold Bloom. NY: Facts on File, 2008, pp. 67-74.

Journal Articles

“Broken Mirrors and Multiplied Reflections in Lord Byron and Mary Shelley.” Studies in Romanticism. 46.4 (2007): 461-80.

“Gender, Class, and Mental Health in Mary Lamb’s Mrs. Leicester’s School.” Journal for the
Advancement of Educational Research. 3.1 (2007): 142-47.

“‘This ain’t no slavery time talk’: The Evolution of African American Folklore in Hurston’s ‘Go Gator and Muddy the Water.’” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature. 12 (2003): 25-35.

“Recovering the Absent Mother in Jane Austen and Mary Shelley” CEA-MAGazine. 15 (2002): 24-36.

“Placing Maurice Within the Shelley-Godwin Circle.” CEA-MAGazine. 14 (2001): 23-33.

“‘Freedom Found Me’: Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Slave Narrative Form.” Middle-Atlantic Writers Association Review. 14.1 (1999). 24-30.

“Mules, Men, and Women: Zora Neale Hurston’s Use of Folklore.” Journal of the Middle States Council for the Social Studies. 14 (1992-93): 36-44.

    Dr. Julie Conger 

    Julie CongerAssociate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
    Julie Cary Conger is an associate professor of English and a faculty member in the Women's & Gender Studies Program. She earned a doctoral degree in American Literature, as well as graduate certificates in Women's Studies and in Social Theory, from the University of Kentucky in 2002. She earned her M.A. degree in English from Georgia State University and her B.A. degree in English from Florida International University.

    Her primary research and teaching areas include nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States literature and culture; critical race theory; African American literature and culture; and Women's & Gender Studies. She is editor of and contributor to a collection of critical essays entitled Passing Interest: Racial Passing in U. S. Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990-2010 (SUNY P, 2014), and the contributing editor for a special issue entitled "Leaping into the Fire: Representations of Women in U. S. Race Riots," of the journal SLI: Studies in the Literary Imagination. Her essays have appeared in American Literature, African American Review, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory. She has authored numerous encyclopedia articles on topics from Uncle Tom's Cabin, to racial passing, to the works of Toni Morrison. Her current project is a monograph exploring sexual reproduction in twentieth-century feminist utopias and dystopias.

    Education:

    B.A., Florida International University
    M.A., Georgia State University
    PhD., University of Kentucky

    Research Areas:

    American Literature, Critical Race Theory, Women's & Gender Studies

    Email: Julie.Conger@morgan.edu 
    Office: Holmes Hall 202B

    Phone: 443-885-1742