Christopher Leise

Christopher Leise earned the B.A. at Hofstra University in 2000, 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.” A second
co-edited collection, Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s
Guide is forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press in Spring
2011. His essays include “‘That Little Incandescence’: Reading the
Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead ” from
Studies in the Novel and work forthcoming on Puritan conversion
narratives in Gravity’s Rainbow from Pynchon Notes. He is currently
writing a book assessing the cultural memory of Puritanism as given in
American fiction after World War Two, as well as an anthology of
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) writing spanning narratives from pre-Contact to
the present.

Dr. Leise is the proud father of two very ticklish children, and perhaps
invests more emotion into the outcome of New York Giants and 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.