Christopher Leise earned the B.A. at Hofstra University in 2007, and the Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo (SUNY) in 2007. Before coming to Whitman College, Professor Leise taught at Plattsburgh State University (SUNY), where he frequently and energetically complained about the cold. He specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary American fiction, American Puritanism, and American Indian literatures from pre-contact to the present. 

Christopher’s first book is a co-edited collection of essays published in Fall 2009, entitled William Gaddis, “The Last of Something.” He recently completed co-editing a second collection of essays on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, and has articles forthcoming on Marilynne Robinson in Studies in the Novel and Thomas Pynchon in Pynchon Notes. He is currently at work on a book assessing the cultural memory of Puritanism as given in American fiction after World War Two, and plans to begin work on a project involving Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) writing in a future that at present seems long distant, due to the demands of the Puritanism book, but his wife assures him this is not so far off.

Dr. Leise is the proud father of two awe-striking children, and perhaps invests more emotion into the outcome of Yankees games than befits a grown man. Alongside the survey of twentieth-century American literature and introductory literature courses, Leise teaches seminars on twenty-first century American literature, a course on representations of the Salem Witch Crisis of 1692, and plans to teach classes in American Indian literatures and perhaps on postmodernism.