Our Staff
Directors
Director
Jonathan Arac returned to Pitt in 2006 as Andrew Mellon Professor of English after five years at Columbia University, where he served as a department chair. Since 1979, he has served on the editorial group of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, edited at the University of Pittsburgh, and since 2001 he has chaired the Advisory Committee for the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is author of six books and many essays on American and British literature. He has also edited six volumes of original essays by many hands on topics in criticism and theory. His current work focuses especially on the novel in the United States and on questions of language in American writing.
Through his experiences at other institutions, Professor Arac has seen the benefits a humanities center brings to university faculty. It offers a showcase to honor and to disseminate the most exciting and innovative work, and by this means it inspires and strengthens ongoing projects.
Jonathan Arac’s departmental Web site
Associate Director
Todd Reeser is an associate professor of French at Pitt, where he has taught since 2004, after five years at the University of Utah. His first published book dealt with the reception of Aristotelian notions of masculinity and gender in key texts of the Renaissance, and his book on interdisciplinary, humanities-based approaches to the study of masculinity will appear in 2009. He has coedited a volume on French masculinities, and is coediting a volume for the MLA on teaching Rabelais. He is currently writing a book that examines the textual reception of Platonic sexuality in 15th- and 16th-century Europe. In his work, he is especially interested in putting into dialogue the ancient, the early modern, and the (post-)modern. The year he spent as a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina convinced him of the productivity and pleasure of collaborative dialogue in the humanities. As associate director of the center, he works to foster that dialogue among his colleagues.