Carol Siegel

Biography:

I teach a fairly large range of classes from a gender studies perspective, including Victorian, 20th Century, and Asian-American literatures and Film Studies. I concentrated on women writers as an undergraduate (at San Francisco State University, BA 1979), wrote my M.A. thesis on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writings and fiction (SFSU 1980), and focused my Ph.D. dissertation on the relation between the work of D. H. Lawrence and traditions in women’s literature (U.C. Berkeley 1987). I was hired as part of a team to create a Women’s Studies program at Loyola New Orleans in 1987 and came to Washington State University as one of two professors hired to create a Humanities program at the Vancouver branch campus in 1990. I have been working with graduate students at the main campus in Pullman ever since.

Selected Publications & Research Interests:

Sex Radical Cinema, my book on the politics of the representation of sexuality in film will be published in 2015. It is transnational and spans the time period from the sexual revolution to today. The purpose of the book is to initiate thought about the difference between radical and liberal representations. Early versions of some of the chapters have appeared in the collections Virgin Territory (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream (Palgrave, 2013) as well as in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video
30.1. My other books include: Lawrence Among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions (University Press of Virginia, 1991), Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love (Indiana University Press, 1995), New Millennial Sexstyles (Indiana University Press, 2000) and Goth’s Dark Empire (Indiana University Press, 2005). I have co-authored a number of collections and published essays on literary texts, films, music, and popular culture. All of my work centers on how visions of sexuality are expressed and how those expressions fit into or disrupt dominant narratives of gender and sexuality. I am sometimes classified as a cultural historian, but see myself as a theorist working primarily from the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler. I am also the co-editor of the online, open-access interdisciplinary journal in theory, Rhizomes.

Graduate Supervision Interests:

Since coming to WSU, I have directed thirty theses and dissertations and served on about forty additional dissertation/thesis committees. I enjoy working with graduate students very much, and often work with students at other universities as well. I particularly like to work on projects involving the representation of sexuality/gender, but also have a strong interest in any project on women writers, Asian American literature, Victorian literature, film, or popular culture. Critical race studies is an area in which I am very intellectually invested, and I have directed several projects with this focus. I teach Shakespeare every year at the upper-division level, because I have loved his plays and poetry since my teens, so I am happy to serve on the graduate committees of students who share this interest.