Vincent B. Leitch _____________________________________________ Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English George Lynn Cross Research Professor University of Oklahoma Phone: (405) 325-6218 Department of English Fax: (405) 325-0831 Gittingerhall, Room 113 Norman, OK 73019-2021 email: vbleitch@ou.edu |
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Biography I was born and raised in Babylon, Long Island, New York. I studied at the State University of New York Maritime College, Hofstra University, Villanova University, and University of Florida, where I earned a Ph.D. focused on the history of poetry and poetics. I have worked as a literature professor at the University of Florida, Mercer University, University of Tampere (Finland), University of Memphis, Purdue University, University of Debrecen (Hungary), and University of Oklahoma. During recent times I have taught mainly in my specialty, criticism and theory, such university courses as Problems in the History of Criticism; Interpretation and Cultural Theory; Topics in Cultural Studies; Contemporary Criticism and Theory; Theories of Postmodern Culture; Philosophy and Literary Theory; Poetry and Poetics; and Modern American Poetry.  Honors I have
received include membership in Phi Kappa Phi; election to PEN American
Center; Outstanding Academic Book from the Association of College and
Research Libraries; senior Fulbright-Hays lectureship in criticism and
theory at the University of Tampere in Finland; listing in Who's Who;
five awards for teaching excellence; appointments to ten
journal advisory boards and four academic press boards; election by
the membership of the Modern Language Association to several national
committees, including the executive committee of the 7,000-member
literary criticism division. In the decade
after completing my doctoral degree, I was awarded four postdoctoral
grants for advanced study. The National Endowment for the Humanities
funded a seminar in literature and theory at Princeton University; the
School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California in
Irvine supported study in its renowned theory program; the Andrew
Mellon Foundation covered expenses for a term at the International
Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies held at Vanderbilt
University; and my own university's Research Fund paid for advanced
language training at the Alliance Française in Paris.I have, in
addition, received six postdoctoral awards for research and
publication. The American Philosophical Society granted me funds for
archival research, leading to the publication of a facsimile edition of
Robert Southwell's forgotten 1591 early meditative text, Marie
Magdalens Funeral Teares (1975). The National Endowment for the
Humanities awarded me a fellowship to finish my book Deconstructive
Criticism (1983), a comparative history of French and American
deconstruction. The American Council of Learned Societies provided a
fellowship, supporting the completion of my intellectual history, American
Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s (1988). I spent a
semester doing research at Purdue University's Center for Humanistic
Studies, where I wrote a polemical work, Cultural Criticism,
Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (1992), that argues for a
cultural studies informed by poststructuralism. And on a second
occasion I worked in Purdue’s Center on my Postmodernism--Local
Effects, Global Flows (1996). The Oklahoma Humanities Council
supported research on Southwestern blues subculture, which appears as a
chapter in my Theory Matters (2003). The National Endowment for
the Humanities awarded me a fellowship for work on the contemporary
history of U.S. literary criticism, bits of which appear in my Living with Theory (2008)
and my American Literary
Criticism since the 1930s, second edition (2010). |