Paul Brians

Biography

Paul Brians got his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, and has taught at WSU ever since. He specializes in literature outside the traditional Anglo-American canon ("postcolonial," European, Asian, and other literatures, plus science fiction) and in interdisciplinary humanities studies and the history of ideas. Brians is widely known through his Web-site providing study guides to various classics of literature and philosophy and his "Common Errors in English.".

Publications

Bawdy Tales from the Courts of Medieval France (Harper & Row, 1975)
Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895-1984 (Kent State Univ. Pr., 1987)
Editor-in-Chief: Reading About the World, vols. 1 & 2 (HarperCollins, 1994, 2nd edition American Heritage 1996, 3rd edition Harcourt Brace, 1999)
Common Errors in English Usage (William, James, 2003)
Modern South Asian Literature in English (Greenwood Press, 2003)

He has published articles on Medieval and modern literature, as well as many related to his work on nuclear war fiction.

Research Interests

Brians is currently interested principally in the modern anglophone writers of South Asia, like Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai. He is also engaged in several projects to deliver music relevant to history and humanities classes remotely via streaming audio.

Graduate Teaching Interests

Brians teaches seminars on "postcolonial" literature, and will soon be designing and teaching a graduate-level course in science fiction to be offered to distance-learning students as part of the the MAET degree.

Links

Course Materials
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/guides_index.html

Curriculum Vitae
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/vita.html

Personal Home Page
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians

World Civilizations
http://www.wsu.edu/~wldciv