Contributors
- Contributors
john bird is Margaret M. Bryant Professor of English at Winthrop University. He is the author of Mark Twain and Metaphor and the president of the Mark Twain Circle of America.
rachel e. blackburn is a Ph.D. student at the University of Kansas, where she also serves as an instructor for acting and public speaking courses in the Theatre Department. Rachel’s research interests live at the intersection of performance, stand-up comedy, gender, and race. She pursues comedy, great theatre, music, and travel, having worked in the theaters of London, Dublin, and Toronto.
stephanie brown is a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently writing her dissertation on gender and gatekeeping in stand-up comedy.
daniel burge is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Alabama. He is writing a dissertation that examines opposition to Manifest Destiny in the period stretching from 1846 to 1872. His research examines how humor functioned as one of the means through which individuals challenged the ideology of Manifest Destiny in this period.
jim caron is Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. In addition to articles on comic art and comic laughter, he has published Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter and co-edited a collection of essays on Charlie Chaplin, Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts. He is the current president of the American Humor Studies Association. [End Page 336]
joe conway is an assistant professor of American literature at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
jessyka finley holds a Ph.D. in African diaspora studies from University of California, Berkeley and is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College.
tara e. friedman teaches English at Widener University in the outskirts of Philadelphia. She is a doctoral candidate in the Literature and Criticism Department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and expects to complete her dissertation on female resistance and agency in selected late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American novels in 2016. Her research interests focus on twentieth-century novels, the environment, and American humor, but she has also presented on critical thinking and writing center theory and pedagogy.
rosemary gallagher is a doctoral research scholar at National University of Ireland, Galway. Her thesis, “Screamingly Funny: A Critical Approach to the Comedic Anti-War Novels of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins and Tony Vigorito,” investigates the application of humor to war literature. She is a postgraduate representative for the Irish Association for American Studies.
lisa guerrero is an associate professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies and the graduate director of the American Studies program at Washington State University. Her research and teaching interests include African American literature, black masculinity, African American satire and humor, critical popular culture studies, and race and commodity culture. She is currently completing her book Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and the Method of Madness, which examines how twenty-first-century black satire demonstrates the ways in which social anxiety of madness and the racial anxiety of blackness have become interlinked through commodification and consumption.
peter c. kunze is a doctoral candidate in radio-television-film at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently coediting with Jared Champion [End Page 337] a collection of essays on contemporary stand-up comedians as public intellectuals.
john wharton lowe is the Barbara Lester Methvin Distinguished Professor of English and a core faculty member of the Institute for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia. He is author or editor of seven books, including Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy; Conversations with Ernest Gaines; and most recently, Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. He has published widely on humor and on African American, Southern, American ethnic, and circum-Caribbean literature. He is the recipient of the MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contributions to Ethnic Literary Studies and is currently writing the authorized biography of Ernest J. Gaines.
joy moore’s work and current research involve physical and prop comedy in performance and sculptural forms, humor...
