Alice Craven

Alice Craven and William Dow’s co-edited Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century will be published late July 2011 by Palgrave. Gathering some of the most important Wright scholarship in the world, along with perspectives from emerging Wright critics, this book explores new themes and theoretical orientations. Essays center on modernism, racism and spatial dimensions, the transnational and political Wright, Wright and class, Wright and the American 1950s and 1960s, and some of the first analyses of Wright’s recently published A Father’s Law (2008). This dynamic collection combines literary and cultural theory with methods of archival research to provide an expanded vision of Wright’s impact on thinking in the twenty-first century.

Alice Craven is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, English and Film Studies. Having served recently as Chair of the Department, she is currently the Writing Program Administrator and FirstBridge Coordinator. She joined the AUP faculty in 1994 after having received her PhD degree at New York University. While her graduate and early research work concentrated on notions of staging and adaptation theory in Baroque tragedy, she has long been combining research in Baroque adaptation theory with parallel issues in cinema.

She has collaborated extensively in the development of interdisciplinary pedagogy and curricular reform in the humanities at the university. Along with her help in shaping FristBridge, she contributed to the creation of FrenchBridge, a signature approach to research in language learning throughout the university curriculum.

Her coordination of two conferences, Discourses Unveiled: The Public Intellectual and Islam in the Humanities and the 2008 Richard Wright Centennial Celebration have led her into other areas of research on creative production in the Parisian banlieues and Black Paris through literature and cinema. She has published and given talks in this area in the United States, France, Taiwan and Turkey.

Alice Craven teaches courses on Surrealism; Film Theory; Shakespeare and Film; Brecht and Cinema; and within the Writing Program. She has offered FirstBridge courses on detective fiction as a genre of the masses as well as a course on the evolution of reading acts, ReadingDotCom. In the summer program she teaches a Comparative Literature course on the aesthetic roots of crime fiction and film in the Parisian context. She has regularly offered courses on film theory at the Institut de Sciences Politiques, University of Guelph, and the Parsons School of Design..

2003 “Post-Colonial Trenches: A Military Speculation on Decolonising the EFL Curriculum” in AAICU Journal, Teaching English, Teaching in English, edited by Rodney Coules and Filitsa Sofianou Mullen, Issue 2, April 2003 (American College of Thessaloniki: Thessaloniki Greece).

2004 “Teaching Beyond the Pale: Interdisciplinary Improvisations” in Intercultural Communications Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, 29-39.

2005 “In the Heat of the Night: Teaching the American Nightmare to the World” in Tamkang Review, edited by Ming Tu-Yang, Volume XXXV, numbers 3-4, 2005, 115-154.

2007 “A Victim in Need is a Victim In Deed: Self-Fashioning in Chester Himes’ Run Man Run” in Questions of Identity in Detective Fiction, edited by Anita Higgie and Linda Martz, Cambridge Scholars Press, Spring and Summer 2007, 37-58.

2008 “Representing Semiramis in Shakespeare and Calderon” in Shakespeare, edited by Mark Hutchinson, Volume 4, Issue 2, Routledge, June 2008 157-169..

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