Richard N. Masteller

Professor of English

Office: Olin 230
Telephone: (509) 527-5278
Fax: (509) 527-5039
E-mail: mastellerr@whitman.edu
   
Professor Richard N. Masteller earned his B.A. with high distinction in English from the University of Rochester, his M.A. in English from the University of Virginia, and his Ph. D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. After teaching English and American Studies at the University of Minnesota and Illinois State University, he joined the Whitman faculty in 1978.

He specializes in the twentieth-century American literature. In addition to teaching American Literature, 1914-Present, he has offered special topics courses on "little magazines," canon formation in American literature, and modern American poetry. His American Studies training, his past position at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, and a postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art have enabled him to include art, film, and photography in such interdisciplinary courses as The Harlem Renaissance, Making Sense of the 1930s, The American City: Image and Experience, The Shaping Spirit, and in other appropriate courses in literature and humanities.

His research interests also focus on the relations between literature and visual art in an American studies context. He has published essays on the vision of the America purveyed by western stereographs of the late nineteenth century, on definitions of modernism as revealed in the American reception of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and on the satiric vision of Reginald Marsh and John Dos Passos in the era of the 1930s. He has been the curator for exhibitions of photography and of satiric graphic art of the 1930s. He is currently engaged in research exploring the relation between literature and art in "little magazines" of the early twentieth-century.