Faculty
Craig Woelfel
Dean of Academic Life
Professional Profile
Professor Woelfel teaches British, American, and world/postcolonial literatures. He is currently the Editor of the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. His primary research interests are in the modernist period (early 20th Century) and intersections between intellectual history, secularization studies, and art; but he enjoys reading and teaching literature from the medieval period to the present, as well as thinking about the intersections of literature with broader intellectual culture - especially religion and the hard sciences. He also (strange though it may seem) loves teaching the First Year Seminar and in team-taught learning communities.
Teaching
Courses taught:
- Contemporary American Literature
- Dante
- Academic Writing
- Great Works of Western Literature
- Great Works of World Literature
- Introduction to British Literature II
- James Joyce (Senior Seminar)
- Literary Theory and Criticism
- Modern and Contemporary British Literature
- Postcolonial Literature
- Lost in Translation
Published Articles:
- The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual , published by the University of Liverpool Press.
- Modernism and the Religious Turn . Renascence 73: 1 (Winter 2021). Available on JSTOR.
- Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief. University of South Carolina Press. October 2018.
- “ New Directions in Scholarship on T. S. Eliot and Religion and Literature .” Religion & Literature 44.1 (Spring 2012), 2-7. Introduction to an essay collection for a special issue of Religion and Literature, which I also co-edited and organized. JSTOR.
- “ Eliot and our Beliefs about Belief .” Essay contributed to the above collection, 7-15. JSTOR,.
- “ Stopping at the Stone: Rethinking Belief (and ‘Non-Belief’) in Modernism via A Passage to India.” Twentieth Century Literature 58.1 (Spring 2012), 26-59. JSTOR.
- “Jungian Descent in ‘Croft Woods.’” The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Burns). Eds. Norman Jope, Paul Scott Derrick and Catherine Byfield. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2011. 221-33.
- “ The Waste Land and Dante’s Poetics of Revelation ,” Semicerchio (2008:2), 17-28.
- Book Review. The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926-7, edited by John Haffenden. American Book Review 35.1 (Nov/Dec 2013), 14.
- Book Review. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel by Pericles Lewis. Religion and Literature, (Spring 2012).
- Book Review. Modes of Faith by Theodore Ziolkowski. Religion and Literature 41.1 (Spring 2009), 197-9.
Research
Education:
- PhD, University of Notre Dame
- American and British/Anglophone Literatures MA, University of Notre Dame
- American and British/Anglophone Literatures MA, University of California, San Diego
- Literatures in English BA, University of California, San Diego
- Literatures in English, Area of Concentration in Political Science
Area of Research:
- British and American modernism
- Postcolonial literatures
- Religion and literature
- Intellectual history
- Literary theory and criticism
- Aesthetics
- Rhetoric and composition