Full-Time Faculty

Christopher Sten
 Ph.D., 1971; M.A., 1968, English and American Literature, Indiana University

I have longstanding teaching and scholarly interests in the American novel, race and ethnicity, visual culture, Transcendentalism and nature writing, the politics of Modernism, and the literature of Washington, DC. Much of my research and writing has focused on Herman Melville, and in recent years, much of my professional life has been devoted to the Melville Society and the Society’s Cultural Project in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Currently I am writing a history of American writers’ involvement in national politics, under the title, Washington, DC: The Politics of American Writing, and compiling a collection of writings about Washington by local and nationally prominent authors, to be titled Literary Capital.

Books:

Co-editor (with Jill Barnum and Wyn Kelley), “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville in the Pacific. Forthcoming 2007, Kent, Ohio: Kent State U Press.

Sounding the Whale: MOBY-DICK as Epic Novel. Kent, Ohio: Kent State U Press, 1996.

The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel. Kent, Ohio: Kent State U Press, 1996.

Editor, Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts. Kent, Ohio: Kent State U Press, 1992.

Other publications:

 “On Seeing Blue: Dutch Painting, Depression, and Generativity in Cather’s The Professor’s House, 17 pgs., Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and Review, XLVII, No. 1 (Summer 2003): 3-8.

“Melville’s Cosmopolitanism: A Map for Living in a (Post-) Colonialist World,” Melville ‘Among the Nations’, eds. Athanasios Christodoulou and Sanford Marovitz ( Kent: Kent State U Press, 2001), pp. 38-48.

“Losing it ‘even as he finds it’: The Invisible Man’s Search for Identity,’ in Approaches to Teaching Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN (New York: Modern Language Association, 1989), Eds. Susan R. Parr and Pancho Savery, pp. 86-95.

“Vere’s Use of the ‘Forms’: Means and Ends in Billy Budd” (1975), rpt. in On Melville: The Best from AMERICAN LITERATURE (Durham: Duke U P, 1988), pp. 188-202.

“’The Wider Life’: Classic American Writers and the Nation’s Capital,” in Washington and Washington Writing, ed. David McAleavey, GW Washington Studies, No. 12 (July 1986), pp. 17-29.