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  • Contributors

AUTHORS

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two story collections and the winner of a 2008 Whiting Writers' Award. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona. His first novel, What You See in the Dark, was published in spring 2011.

David J. Peterson is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, teaching colonial to nineteenth-century literature of the Americas, American poetry, and American and Irish drama. His research focuses on language and homophobia as well as masculinity and sexuality in western American culture. His recent publications include several articles on homophobic discourse, including an analysis of representations of homophobia in Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain."

Kim Vanderlaan is currently an assistant professor of English. She earned her PhD from the University of Delaware, where she wrote her dissertation on art figures and tropes in selected fiction of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. She currently resides in Ruston, Louisiana, with her husband and son. [End Page 110]

Deborah Weagel, an independent scholar, has earned a bachelor's degree in art, master's degrees in music and French, and a PhD in English. With her interdisciplinary background, she has published three books and a variety of articles in academic journals. One area of particular interest involves metaphors of quilts and quiltmaking in contemporary Native American fiction.

Robert Zaller is a professor of history at Drexel University. He is the author, among other works, of The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers (Cambridge University Press, reprint edition 2009), and Robinson Jeffers and the California Sublime (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

ARTISTS

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books-that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre, Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times. His works can be found in museums throughout the world, including the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum, and the Menil in Houston, Texas.

Wladyslaw Theodor Benda (1873-1948) studied art at the Krakow College of Technology and Art in his native Poland and at the School of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. Upon settling in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, Benda attended the Art Students League in New York and the William Merritt Chase School. He was primarily a graphic artist, illustrating books, short stories, advertising copy, and magazine covers for Collier's, McCall's, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Theatre Magazine and many others. In his time, he was as well known as Norman Rockwell, N. C. Wyeth, and Maxfield Parrish. Benda was also considered the premiere mask maker of the early twentieth century. His masks were shown in magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue. In 1944, Benda published a book, Masks, a study of his designs and technique that became a widely used textbook on the subject. [End Page 111]

Paul Dougherty (1877-1947) was a renowned painter of marine and desert subjects. Following in his father's footsteps, Dougherty had trained to become a lawyer, though deserted the vocation for painting. He lived in Europe for the first five years of the twentieth century, drawing, sketching, and painting in London, Paris, Vienna, and Florence. In 1928, arthritis forced him to seek a milder climate. He began spending his winters in Arizona, where he painted desert landscapes and mountains. In 1931, Dougherty moved to the Monterey Peninsula in California and set up a permanent home and studio in the Carmel Highlands, where he became actively involved in the formation of the Carmel Art Association. He was a member of the Board of Directors from 1931 to 1941. His work is in the collections of many museums throughout the country...

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