Kurt Fosso

Kurt Fosso received his PhD in English, with an emphasis in critical theory, from the University of California, Irvine. He joined LC’s Department of English in 1995, and teaches courses on British Romantic literature, classical studies, animal rights, and literary theory. His scholarship focuses upon such Romantic-era writers as William Blake and William Wordsworth, whose works he has examined for their depictions of animals and animal being—and also, in the case of Wordsworth, for his poems’ social meaning. Fosso’s most recent publication explores “Oedipus and the Stars.”

Specialty

British Romanticism, Literary Theory, Animal Studies

Academic Credentials

PhD University of California, Irvine

BA University of Washington

Teaching

ENG 206 - Major Periods and Issues in English Literature

ENG 276 - Animals and Animal Rights in Literature

ENG 309 - Ancient Masterpieces and English Literature

ENG 314 - Romanticism in the Age of Revolution

ENG 340- Literary Theory

ENG 450 - Frankenstein and the Shelleys

Research

“Oedipus and the Stars,” New England Classical Journal 46.2 (2019): 4-18.

“Animals,” William Blake in Context, ed. Sarah Haggarty, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 237-44.

“Blake’s ‘Horses of Instruction,’” Beastly Blake (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature), ed. Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 37-63.

“Of Asses and Men: Animals in Wordsworth’s Peter Bell,” Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lisa Ottum and Seth T. Reno, University of New Hampshire Press, 2016, 78-107.

“Animals,” William Wordsworth in Context, ed. Andrew Bennett, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 241-49.

“‘Feet of Beasts’: Tracking the Animal in Blake,” European Romantic Review 25.2 (2014): 113-38.

“Blake’s ‘Introduction’ and Hesiod’s Theogony,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 47.1 (2013): 9 pars.

“J. Hillis Miller’s Virtual Reality of Reading,” with Jerry Harp, College English 75.1 (2012): 79-94.

“Oedipus Crux: Reasonable Doubt in Oedipus the King,” College Literature 39.3 (2012): 26-60.

Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning, State University of New York Press, 2004.

Professional Experience

2017     Program Leader for the Ireland Study Abroad Program

2012     Program Leader for the Scotland Study Abroad Program

2001     Teacher of the Year