Dr. Leah Flack糖心传媒Marquette Hall, 219
MilwaukeeWI53201United States of America(414) 288-3316leah.flack@marquette.eduI started college as a first-gen Biochemistry and Music double major and obviously changed my mind, finishing with a double major in English and Russian. I never doubted my choice, even if I could not persuasively explain it to anyone at the time. The past decade as a scholar, teacher, and human being has given me a sense of profound joy that I chose what was right for me before I had the language to explain it.
I learned from my favorite writers, my students, and my colleagues the value of being able to (as Seamus Heaney wrote) 鈥渨alk on air against your better judgment.鈥� In doing so, I figured out two things: living well requires imaginative courage, something I acquired through learning to read, write, and speak deeply and powerfully; and the skills and insights we refine through the activities of English in the classroom and in our research and creative endeavors prepare us to do high-impact work that matters across a life well-lived.
My research in comparative literature has examined the Western literary tradition as a source of imaginative liberation from political and social oppression. I am interested in why writers from different national traditions return to ancient stories and formal innovation in moments of personal and global crisis. In my work on the modernist period, I challenged theories that saw Homer鈥檚 Iliad and Odyssey as sources of stable truth for writers trying to respond to the devastation and confusion of the opening decades of the twentieth century. What I learned in writing my first two books鈥�Modernism and Homer (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and James Joyce and Classical Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020)鈥攚as that some of the most innovative, rebellious writers in the modernist period saw the ancient world as a source of resistance to political power, social oppression, and a culture鈥檚 prevailing ideas that lead to the perpetuation of war, violence, and injustice. The academic institution has turned both the ancient and modern texts I study into status symbols of cultural prestige, but this belies the subversive energy underlying them.
These days, I am excited to be working as the campus director for N4@MU, part of the global nonprofit Narrative 4, which brings together communities across lines of difference to create empathy, hope, and understanding. My research right now is a blend of the familiar and the new. Most immediately, I am working to finish a decades-long passion project on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam鈥檚 archive. I am also preparing to do collaborative community-engaged research on the role creativity, storytelling, and dialogue play in relation to how we orient ourselves to the future and how we understand our capacity to change ourselves and our communities.
Office Hours
Fall 2024
Teaching Schedule
Fall 2024
