English and Comparative Literature

Professor Thrailkill's talk was delivered at TEDxUNC 2013.

Jane F. Thrailkill is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Associate Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. She teaches American literature, critical theory, and medical humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she also serves as Director of Graduate Admissions for English. Her first book, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Harvard UP, 2007), examines the influence of modern neurology on the nineteenth-century novel. Her articles on the intersections of science, philosophy, medicine, and literature have appeared in Neurology and Modernity, English Literary History, Journal of Narrative Theory, American Literature, and Poetics Today. Currently, she is collaborating with faculty in Anthropology, Journalism, and Social Medicine to create interdisciplinary courses for a new graduate program in Literature, Medicine, and Culture at UNC.

Professor McKeon's talk was delivered as part of the Department of English and Comparative Literature's Critical Speakers Series. 

Michael McKeon's "The Origins of the English Novel in the Parody of Family Romance" from SITES on Vimeo.

Michael McKeon, Professor II and Board of Governors Professor of Literature at Rutgers University, has written three books on topics in interdisciplinary British Studies: Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (Harvard, 1975), The Origins of the English Novel (Hopkins, 1987) (which won the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize for best book of the year), and The Secret History of Domesticity (Hopkins, 2005), which has been the subject of several academic meetings, including a "Roundtable" at the North American Conference on British Studies Annual Meeting, Cambridge, MA in 2006 and a one-day “Workshop" at the ”Making Publics Project, 1500-1700," McGill University, Montréal, in 2007. McKeon also has edited the anthology Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Hopkins, 2000). He has served on two Executive Committees of the MLA and on the Supervising Committee of the English Institute. At Rutgers this Fall McKeon is teaching his fourth and final dissertation seminar on "Problems in Historical Interpretation for Literary Scholars," supported by the Mellon Foundation.