Lisa Gordis's Home Page

Associate Professor of English Director, First-year Seminar Program Barnard College 3009 Broadway New York, NY 10027 (212) 854-2114	lgordis@barnard.edu Mailbox: Barnard 417 Office: Barnard 408D Office hours: Mondays 1:45 to 3 and by appointment. To sign up for an appointment, click here to go to http://professorgordis.pbwiki.com.

Spring 2008 Courses: English BC3180y: American Literature, 1800-1870 FYSB BC 1181: The American Supernatural Fall 2007 Courses: English BC3179x: American Literature to 1800 English BC 3997: Reading and Writing Women in Colonial America Other Courses: American Studies 3002y: Approaches to American Culture, 1607-1865 (Spring 1999) English BC3997x: Nineteenth-century American Women Writers (Fall 2003) English BC3193x: Literary Criticism and Theory	Useful resources: useful links in American literature and culture Columbia Library reference tools Addall.com (new books / used books) Books in Print CLIO Early American Newspapers Early English Books Online Eighteenth Century Collections Online Evans Digital Edition JSTOR MLA Bibliography Oxford English Dictionary Project Muse http://booksforchildren.pbwiki.com Local resources: Barnard College English Department Barnard College Courseworks BEATL

Selected publications: "'Bring Forth the Old Because of the New': Early Americanists and Contemporary Culture," Early American Literature 41.2 (2006): 369-375. (Response to the American Antiquarian Society's 2005 conference on "Histories of Manuscript, Print, and Performance in America.") "The Conversion Narrative in Early America,” in A Companion to The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer. (Malden, Massachusetts and London, England: Blackwell, 2005) 369-386. "Spirit and Substance: John Woolman and ‘the Language of the Holy One,’" in The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman, edited by Mike Heller. (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill P, 2003). Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003). *"Consecrating a Rebellion: Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Friedrich Strauss, and the Historical Jesus," Journal of Unitarian Universalist History* 24 (1997): 1-16. "The Experience of Covenant Theology in George Herbert’s The Temple," The Journal of Religion 76.3 (July 1996): 383-401.**

Current projects: "The word in it self": Transparency and Substance in Early Quaker Language (book manuscript) explores the paradoxical complexities generated by early Quaker theories of simplicity in language, drawing on seventeenth-century English and eighteenth-century American Quaker writings, and considering their impact on the political activity of eighteenth-century Quakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly and on the broader American literary tradition, especially in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.	Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana: I am part of a team of scholars preparing Mather's 4500-page holograph manuscript Bible commentary for publication in ten volumes in the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections.


Humpback whales lunge-feeding off the coast of Maine. August 1996.