Hugh Egan

Hugh Egan has been a member of the English department at Ithaca College since 1985. His primary field is American literature and he has particular teaching and research interests in literature of the frontier, literature of the sea, first-person voice, Native American literature, and the authors James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. He has served as department chair and he directed the Humanities and Sciences Honors Program from 1995 to 2001. Professor Egan has twice taught as a Fulbright lecturer in American literature--in Sweden (1992) and in Indonesia (2003).

Current and recent courses

• Critical Practice
• Introduction to American Literature: First Person Voice in America
• Introduction to Fiction: the Poetics of Domesticity and the Poetics of Adventure
• Great American Writers Before 1890: Discovery and Discourse in America
• Studies in American Literature: The Alienated Storyteller
• Honors intermediate seminar: American Breakdown--The Literature of Madness in America
• Honors first year seminar: Native Voice in American Fiction
• Honors junior year seminar: American individualism

Some recent activities

Current project: "Historical Introduction" (with William H. Dudley) to new edition of James Fenimore Cooper's Ned Myers (1843). Ed. Robert D. Madison. New York: AMS Press.

Review of James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years, by Wayne Franklin. The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, forthcoming 2008.

Review of Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle, by Eliza Richards; Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance, by Bruce Mills. American Literature, December 2007.

"Entangled Rhyme: A Dialogic Reading of Melville's Battle Pieces (with David DeVries, Cornell University). Leviathan (special issue on Melville's poetry), October 2007.

"The 'hunger of the human heart': Religion and the Creative Imagination in Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger)." A paper delivered at the College Language Association conference, Miami FL, April 2007.

"Richard Henry Dana, Jr.” Entry in Encyclopedia of Maritime History. Oxford University Press, 2007.