California Faculty 2026

Amy Rodgers, On-site director. AB, Columbia University; PhD, University of Michigan. Associate Professor of Film, Media, and Theatre and Dean for the Senior Class, Mount Holyoke College.

Amy Rodgers is Associate Professor of Film, Media, and Theatre at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on early modern literature and culture, audience and popular culture studies, theories of adaptation, and dance studies. Among her publications are essays on the Renaissance court masque, Hindi-language cinema director Vishal Bhardwaj, Shakespeare’s history plays’ influence on HBO’s Game of Thrones, and performance genealogies that cross different communicative forms, particularly theater and dance. Her first monograph, A Monster With a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press in February of 2018. She is a co-founder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project, and, before commencing her academic career, danced with the Washington, Atlanta, and Joffrey ballet companies.

Michelle Burnham, BA, Trinity College, MA, PhD State University of New York at Buffalo; Professor of English at Santa Clara University.

Michelle Burnham is Professor of English at Santa Clara University where she teaches early American literature, world literature, indigenous literature, and cultural studies. She is the author of three monographs: Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific; Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System (2007); and Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature 1682-1861 (1997). She has also edited the 1767 novel The Female American (2014) and A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson (2008). She also edits the Re-Editions series at Lever Press, and is committed to recovering forgotten voices and texts from literary history.

Dennis Denisoff, BA, Simon Fraser University; PhD, McGill University. McFarlin Professor of English and Film, University of Tulsa. 

Dennis Denisoff is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is a creative writer and scholar of Victorian literature, eco-criticism, and gender/queer studies. He has published four monographs, two novels, a poetry collection, 11 edited or co-edited works, and over 50 articles. Recent publications include Decadent Ecology: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival (2022) and special journal issues on “Global Decadence” (Feminist Modernist Studies, 2021) and “Scales of Decadence” (Victorian Literature and Culture, 2021). He is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Literature and the Environment (2026) and is a co-editor of Cambridge University Press’s monograph series “Victorian Literature, Science, and the Environment.”
 

Mark C. Jerng, BA, Princeton University; PhD, Harvard University. Professor of English and Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis. 

Mark Jerng works in the research areas of speculative fiction, critical race theory, and Asian American literary studies. He is the author of two monographs, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) and Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (2010). He is currently working on a monograph treating law, speculative fiction, racialization, and capital.   

Rachel Lee, BA, Cornell University; PhD, UCLA. Professor of English, Gender Studies, and the Institute of Society and Genetics, UCLA.

Rachel C. Lee specializes in studies of embodiment through a health humanities/disability studies, women-of-color feminist, art and environmental justice approach. She is the author of The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gender Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999), The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality and Posthuman Ecologies (2014) editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian and Pacific Islander Literature (2014), and a founding editorial board member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.