EDUCATION

A.B., City College of New York
M.A., University of Manitoba
Ph.D., University of New Hampshire

ACADEMIC PROFILE

Professor - Academic specializations: American Humor Since 1980; American Literature: 1790-1860; Gothic Fiction.

COURSES

 EN010.19- First Year Writing Seminar

 EN141.01- American Literary History I

 EN478- Poe & the Gothic

 EN490.01- Writing Workshop: Humor

 543.01 - Humor

 748.01 - Early American Fiction & Nonfiction

PUBLICATIONS (SELECTED)

• Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict,The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature, State University of New York Press, 1989.
• Editor, “The Muhammad Cartoons and Humor Research” in HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 21-1(2008): 1-46.
• "Painful Laughter: The Collapse of Humor in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories," reprinted in Charles L. P. Silet, ed., The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays, Scarecrow Press, 2006.
• "Charles Brockden Brown and Woman Warriors of the 1790's," in Early American Literature 40: 1(2005): 37-55.
• "A 'Wild' and 'Homely' Narrative: Resisting Argument in 'The Black Cat'" Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism," 35 (2002):1-14; and in POEtic Effect and Cultural Discourses, Ed. Hermann Josef Schnackertz (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 2003), 61-84.
• "'Lectures or a Little Charity': Poor Visits in Antebellum Literature and Culture," New England Quarterly (June 2000): 246-73.  
• Paul Lewis discusses Cracking Up on WBUR's "On Point"
• "Across the Great Divide," (a review of How to Win a Fight with a Liberal and How to Win a Fight with a Conservative by Daniel Kurtzman, Sourcebooks, Inc., 2007), Tikkun, March/April 2008, 73-4.
• "Take this President ... Somebody Please," Tikkun, November-December, 2007, 60-62; with a response essay by Michael Nagler: 63-64.
• "Stephen Colbert, Character and Candidate" (op-ed), Providence Journal, October 31, 2007
• "Missing the Punch Line," a review of "The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks" by James Robert Parish (John Wiley & Sons, 2007), in Haaretz, September 7, 2007, 12-13.
• "Beyond Empathy: Sarah Silverman and the Limits of Comedy," Tikkun, September-October, 2007, 88-89.
• "And divided we laugh: the year in humor," Boston Globe, December 29, 2006.
• "Meanwhile: Laughing all the way to the war," International Herald Tribune, December 8, 2006.
•  "Funny Thing About Elections," Philadelphia Inquirer, September 8, 2006.
• "Hamlet: A Mature Reading," Washington Post, February 26, 1997.
• "The Sweet Cycle: From Blossom to Berry to Jam," New York Times, September 23, 1992.

ADDITIONAL PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION