Camille Roman

Biography

Camille Roman (Ph.D., Brown University, 1990) is associate professor of English, works with graduate students in both English and American Studies and is on the faculties of Women's Studies and the Honors College. She has held visiting appointments at Brown University and Potchefstromse Universiteit, South Africa. She publishes primarily on transnational, gender, race, and class politics in twentieth-century culture. Professor Roman is an internationally recognized journalist, writer, editor, and poet. Her most recent book is THE NEW ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN POETRY: MODERNISMS (2005) coedited with Steven Gould Axelrod (UC-Riverside) and Thomas Travisano (Hartwick College), the second text in a three-volume paperback and hardcover project with Rutgers University Press. The first volume of the anthology on American poetry to 1900 published in 2003 received the CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE AWARD 2003 for its social and literary reconstruction of the nation's cultural and political history. In November 2004, Palgrave/Macmillan published a paperback edition of her monograph ELIZABETH BISHOP'S WORLD WAR II-COLD WAR VIEW (2001), which was honored at a special reception recognizing Bishop's year as national poet laureate and held at The Library of Congress in 2000. THE WOMEN & LANGUAGE DEBATE: A SOURCEBOOK coedited with Suzanne Juhasz (University of Colorado) and Cristanne Miller (Pomona College) was published in 1993 and 1994 by Rutgers University Press and became an online e-book in 1999. ACRL (American College and Research Libraries) selected it as one of the required texts in women, gender, and language collections, and The New York Public Libraries named it as one of the "pioneering" foundational texts in the establishment of women's studies as an interdisciplinary field. With Chris D. Frigon, she cofounded and coedited The Twayne Music Book Series and served as individual volume editor for books on The Beatles, Sonny Rollins, Claude Debussy, Carlos Chavez, Olivier Messiaen, Downhome Blues Lyrics, Lester Young, and Black Women Composers. Currently she is coediting volume three of the American poetry anthology and coauthoring an introduction to poetry textbook with Rise Axelrod (UC-Riverside), Steven Gould Axelrod, and Thomas Travisano for Wadsworth/Thomson Publishers. She is president-elect of The Robert Frost Society and serves on the advisory boards of TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE and The Elizabeth Bishop Society. Before pursuing graduate studies in literature and culture, she worked in mass communications, journalism, and the theater. Her multicultural advocacy for the Cambridge Massachusetts Public Libraries earned her the national John Cotton Dana Prize in Library Public Relations.

Publications

Frustrating gaps, puzzling fragments, multiple questions, contradictory stories, and confounding messages--they have led me into a dozen books to date as well as many essays, newspaper articles, memoirs, reviews, poems, and interviews. Nothing is as tantalizing to me as a clue waiting to be found and narrated. Here is a typical example of what I mean from some work currently in progress. While coediting THE NEW ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN POETRY: MODERNISMS recently, I engaged in my favorite academic passion of juxtaposing texts that have never been considered together. Now I am writing a paper about what I discovered from this juxtaposition: the surprising historical syncronicity of the high culture poetic movement Dada, the mainstream American Orientalist-inspired lyric "Ja Da," and the Swing Era's signature song by Duke Ellington, "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).".

Research Interests

I am committed to pursuing canon revision and revisionist history in American poetry, in the politics of language, and in twentieth-century culture. I am senior editor of an introduction to poetry text so I also am interested in poetry in the undergraduate classroom.

Graduate Teaching Interests

I generally offer seminars that parallel my research interests in transnationalism, gender, race, and class in American poetry, the politics of language, and twentieth-century culture. I also am developing a seminar to explore transnational Japanese and American dialogues in nineteenth-century culture that are vital to understanding the international character of modernism.

Links

WSU News Service story