Jeff Allred
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (2005)
Associate Professor
Office: 1237 HW
Office Hours: Friday 12-2 and by appointment
Phone: 212.772.5170
jeff.allred@hunter.cuny.edu
Professor Allred has been at Hunter since 2005. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, modernism, and literary theory, in addition to more specialized topics, such as “William Faulkner” “ABC of Modernism,” and “Art/Work: Labor and Culture in the 20th Century US.” His proudest achievement in the classroom came recently in the form of an anonymous student comment (you know who you are): “Prof. Allred makes bad books seem good.”
Professor Allred has recently published a book, American Modernism and Depression Documentary (Oxford University Press, 2010), which surveys the uneven terrain of American modernity through the lens of photo-documentary books, including work by James Agee/Walker Evans, Richard Wright, and Erskine Caldwell/Margaret Bourke-White. For a more detailed description of the book see the 2010 interview on Rorotoko. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Foerster Prize (awarded annually for the best article in American Literature), a year-long fellowship at the CUNY Center for the Humanities, and a Duncan Fellowship at the Ransom Center for the Humanities., and a Hunter Fellowship in Teaching and Technology grant for developing new web-based pedagogy He has published articles on American literature, modernism, and media history in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Criticism: A Quarterly for the Arts, and others, including a recent review-essay on the idea of normality in American culture in American Literary History. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled ABC of Modernism, a chapter on "Visual Cultures of Modernism" for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, and "Novel Hacks," an essay examining the history of the novel genre in light of the ongoing migration in reading from print to screen that is forthcoming in Transformations. He is also overseeing the creation (by students) of Yoknapedia, an free and open encylopedic resource for readers of William Faulkner's work. For more, check out his blog.