Mary Lynn Broe
Caroline Werner Gannett Professor of Humanities

The Rochester Institute of Technology

Teaching and Research Interests:

My teaching career began in the University of Notre Dame’s interdisciplinary Collegiate Seminar Program and  The Program on Non-Violence (1970-74). At Binghamton University (1974-86), as Assistant and tenured Associate Professor, I taught interdisciplinary courses in Women’s Studies, and both graduate and undergraduate courses in the English Department. From 1986-2002, I held the inaugural Louise Rosenfield Noun endowed Chair at Grinnell College, founding The Noun Program in Women’s Studies and directing its various initiatives. As Caroline Werner Gannett Professor of Humanities at RIT (2006), I founded and chair the interdisciplinary Caroline Werner Gannett Project, a visible new series of speakers, events and courses that fosters explorations of sciences, social sciences, and  technology with the humanities.

In addition torecently published poetry; essays on modernist poets, playwrights, fictionists and multimedia artist Charles Henri Ford, my books include: Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (U. Missouri, 1980); co-edited Women’s Writing in Exile (U. North Carolina, 1989); edited Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (Southern Illinois U. Press, 1991); and my selection of letters from two American expatriates, Black Walking: Selected Letters of Djuna Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman, 1934-38, published by Wagenbach (Im Dunkeln Gehn, Berlin, 2002) and by Archinto (Camminare nel Buio, Milan, 2004). The volume of  letters will be marketed in English. Current books-in-progress include the creative non-fiction, Sweeping up the Heart, and a chapbook of poetry. 

My teaching often goes hand-in-hand with scholarly research and presentations (e.g., Society for Science, Literature and the Arts panel, “Cultural Uses of the New Cartographies,” Amsterdam, June, 2006; and “Moving Out/There: Strategies for Redefining Academic Spaces, ” panel for the interdisciplinary conference, “Defining Space,” University of Dublin, October, 2007) My interests have always ranged widely across modern and contemporary literatures, including revisions of modernism; contemporary poetry and poetics; feminist theory; life-writing and select diasporic literatures. New directions in teaching include interdisciplinary collaborations within the Caroline Werner Gannett Project, such as the co-directed 2008-09 “Visionaries in Motion” course and “Truth & Consequences: Studies in Disciplinary Evidence.”

I have held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies,  Getty Foundation, Ford Foundation (co-participant). In 1982, I was selected among a group of international scholars for a  residency at the Rockefeller Center’s Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy.

Courses at Rochester Institute of Technology:

Visionaries in Motion (co-directed with Gary Skuse in COLA, COS)

Maps, Spaces and Places

The Novel: Banned, Burned and Transgressive Novels

Autobiography (Life Writings Across Cultures)

The Art of Poetry

Truth & Consequences:  Studies in Interdisciplinary Evidence

The Cognitive Revolution (co-directed with Kirsten Waterstram-Rich)