Emeritus Faculty
We are proud of the prestigious scholars and writers who have taught in the English Department at UB.
Barbara Bono was a member of the UB English Department from 1984 to 2020, after teaching at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for a number of years and holding post-doctoral fellowships at Cornell and Harvard. She is the author of Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilean Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (The University of California Press) and numerous articles on the early modern literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She has been the recipient of several major awards for excellence in teaching and mentoring, and has served in several administrative capacities throughout the University, including as the President of UB’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (1992-2015), the Co-Director of UB’s Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender (2003-6) and the Academic Director of UB’s Undergraduate Academy for Civic Engagement (2010-16). These days she mostly publishes through the on-line resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she was UB’s institutional representative from 1999-2019, and serves on the Boards of several local artistic and social justice not-for-profits.
Email: bunn@buffalo.edu
Jim Bunn was a member of the UB English Departmentfrom 1969 to 2009. He taught semiotics, 18th-century and romantic literature, utopias, and for the last dozen years or so, environmental literature. From 1981-1984, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters and then for the next three years he was the first Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. During that time he was part of the most sweeping General Education program among public universities. His books include The Dimensionality of Signs, Tools and Models (Indiana University Press), Wave Forms: A Natural Syntax for Rhythmics Languages (Stanford University Press), and The Natural law of Cycles: Governing Mobile Symmetries of Animals and Machines (Transactions Publishers).
Bob Daly came to UB in 1973, and quickly became of the most respected and beloved figures in the department. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, he published God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry along with a slew of articles on James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the teaching of English Literature. He retired in 2017, as SUNY Distinguished Professor, a titled he held for over 25 years.
Email: cedennis@buffalo.edu
Carl Dennis came to the English Department at UB in September, 1966, and stopped teaching in December, 2001. In his own words, “We had a lively department, and in the rapid expansion from a private to a public university were hiring five or six Assistant Professors for six years or so, and so I had a large group my age to choose my friends from. And I will always be grateful to the liberal notions of our Chair, Albert Cook, who established an openness to writers of fiction and poetry, so that I was allowed to move from writing criticism to writing poetry without any friction. And I was lucky enough to be drafted by one of the experimental colleges in the early seventies, Vico College, where I was able to read and teach the Greek and Roman classics, a huge gift to my own work.”
Email: wcfischer@yahoo.com
Email: engstef@buffalo.edu
Professor Fleischer came to UB in 1967, after a few years as an assistant professor at UC Riverside in California. A scholar of European fiction (primarily German and English, but also Italian), Professor Fleischer taught classes about film and photography. Once arrested as part of the infamous “Buffalo 45” – a group of faculty protesting the Vietnam War – he retired in 2006.
Email: rfly@buffalo.edu
Richard Fly joined UB in 1969 and taught in the department for more than 30 years before retiring to California in 2001. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Mediated World (1976) and dozens of articles and reviews of works on and about William Shakespeare.
Email: 37snhowe@gmail.com
Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and literary criticism, Susan Howe's recent collection of poems, That This, published by New Directions won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Three CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth and Souls of the Labadie Tract, and Frolic Architecture were released on the Blue Chopsticks label (2005; 2011). Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Howe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000-2006. In fall, 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin. Recently she was an Artist In Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. This fall her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon,and in the Whitney Biennial 2014. She lives in Guilford, CT.
Email: ckahane@buffalo.edu
Claire Kahane, Professor Emerita of English at UB, is also a Research Associate in the Department of English at UC Berkeley, and a graduate member of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic and feminist critic, she taught at UB from July 1974 until July 2000. A member of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, she taught courses on hysteria and modern narrative as well as literary representations of holocaust trauma. Currently based in Berkeley, she has recently completed a picaresque memoir entitled Nine Lives: Adventures in Becoming. A short piece, “My Mother’s Story,” appears in the Winter issue of the online literary journal, Persimmon Tree. She continues to write both personal and academic essays, and is working on a book on Ian McEwan’s fiction.
Email: mnklein@buffalo.edu
Professor Klein taught in the UB English department from 1965 until his retirement in 1997. His work focused on American popular culture of the 19th and 20th Centuries. He authored two books: Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters, 1870-1900, which explores some of the dominant characters of American literature as responses to massive immigration, and After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century, with essays on Saul Bellow, Bernard Falamud, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Wright Morris.
Email: massey@buffalo.edu
Irving Massey received his B.A. from McGill University, MA's from both Harvard and Columbia University, and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He taught at UB from 1964-1996. He has published many books, including Find You the Virtue: Ethics, Image, and Desire in Literature, The Uncreating Word: Romanticism and the Object, and most recently, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (University of Texas Press, 2009). He is currently working on a book project entitled Metaphor: A Pentagram.
Carla Mazzio joined the department in 2008 as a deeply innovative scholar of Shakespeare and early modern literature and culture, and histories of science, medicine, and the environment. Author of The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence, awarded the 2010 Roland H. Bainton Prize for literature, and co-author, editor, or co-editor of six other books-- including Shakespeare & Science; The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (with David Hillman, awarded the Beatrice White Book Prize); Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700 (with Bradin Cormack); and Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (with Doublas Trevor)-- Mazzio's commitment to collaboration and community infused her work across campus and in the department. She co-founded and co-directed the long-running "Science Studies, Humanities, and the Arts" research workshop with James Bono (History), founded and chaired the Foreign Language Initiative Committee with a focus on graduate education, and served in positions such as Director of Graduate Studies and Director of Graduate Admissions. Her scholarship was supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Huntington Library in Southern California, where she moved to be with her family and teach for the University of California in 2021.
Email: nschmitz@buffalo.edu
Primarily a scholar of American literature and culture, with specific focus on Mark Twain, Professor Schmitz published two books while at UB: White Robe’s Dilemma: Tribal History in American Literature and Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature. A recipient of the Chancellors Award for Excellence in Teaching, Professor Schmitz retired from UB in 2013, after more than 40 years in the English department.
Email: fredg@buffalo.edu
A distinguished scholar of 19th Century American literature, Professor See retired in 2000, after 33 years of service to the university.
Email: spiegel@buffalo.edu
Primarily a scholar of the English Renaissance, Professor Swan also focused on the use and acquisition of language through the lens of disability studies. He joined UB in 1968 and retired 40 years later, in 2008.
Email: maxwickert1@me.com
Max Albrecht Wickert emigrated from Germany in his teens. He joined the UB English Department in 1966 after earning his Ph.D. at Yale. He taught chiefly undergraduate courses, notably the “Intensive Survey of English Literature” (a double-credit, upper-division course of his invention designed for prospective graduate students), “Dante’s Divine Comedy in Translation”, and “Creative Writing: Poetry.” He served for several years as the departmental Director of Undergraduate Studies.
In addition to scholarly articles on Spenser and on early opera, he published many poems in journals, and in three book-length collections: All the Weight of the Still Midnight (1972), Pat Sonnets (2000) and No Cartoons (2011). His novella, “The Scythe of Saturn”, based on memories of his World War II childhood, was a prize-winner in the 1984 Stand Magazine (UK) Fiction Competition.
Max Wickert also translated verse from German into English (most notably by Georg Trakl) and from English into German (including work by Tuli Kupferberg). He shifted to Italian in the late 1980s and, after his retirement in 2007, published verse translations of three works by the Renaissance classic, Torquato Tasso: The Liberation of Jerusalem (a rendering of Tasso’s crusader epic Gerusalemme liberata; Oxford World’s Classics, 2009), followed by Love Poems for Lucrezia Bendidio (Tasso’s Rime, Book One; Italica Press, 2011) and the chivalric romance, Rinaldo (Italica Press, 2017). His translation of Andrea da Barberino’s enormous cycle of Carolingian prose romances, The Royal House of France (I Reali di Francia) is available on the internet.
During the 1970s, Wickert was a campus anti-war activist, arrested and briefly jailed as one of the “Hayes Hall 45”. At conviction of the 45 for civil trespass was overturned on appeal.
At around the same time Wickert became the founder-director of Buffalo’s Outriders Poetry Project, originally an off-campus reading series and now operating as a small press in which he edited both An Outriders Anthology (2013) and Four Buffalo Poets (2016). Other Outriders authors published on his watch include Jeremy Rush Bowen, Gail Fischer, Ann Goldsmith, Jerry McGuire, Edric Mesmer, Martin Pops, Sherry Robbins, Jacob Schepers, Judith Slater, Carole Southwood, and Linda Zisquit.
See also: <www.outriderspoetryproject.com> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max Wickert>
David Willbern
Email: willbern@buffalo.edu
David Willbern (B.A. Amherst, Ph.D. UC Berkeley) was a member of the UB faculty from 1972 to 2005. He taught courses in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature, American Best Sellers, and Literature and Psychology. He served as Director of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts (later known as the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture), as well as Associate Chair of the English Department, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, and founding Director of the Educational Technology Center. He has written two books: Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language (1987), and The American Popular Novel After World War II: A Study of 25 Best Sellers, 1947-2000 (2013). He now lives in the New Mexico high desert.