Steven Thomas
Professor, English Department
Director of Integrated Learning, Office of the Provost
718-420-4523 steven.thomas@wagner.edu Parker 308 Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:00 -- 11:00 am
Wednesdays 10:15 -- 11:45 am
or by appointment
Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University
M.A. University of Maryland
B.A. Brown University
My teaching and research interests include early American literature, African studies, Ethiopian cinema, economic discourse during the 17th and 18th centuries, globalization in the 21st century, cultural theory, and film studies.
In 2016, I was a Fulbright Scholar at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia where I contributed to the development of its new graduate program in film. My essay on ethnic Oromo cinema was published in Cine-Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa in 2018. I have published several more articles on Ethiopian-American literature and Ethiopian cinema, including one for general readers here on the Zócalo Public Square that profiles the exciting women driving Ethiopia's movie industry forward.
In addition, with my colleague Srividhya Swaminathan, I co-edited a collection of essays analyzing how the eighteenth century is represented in movies and television: The Cinematic Eighteenth Century: History, Culture, and Adaptation in 2017.
During the 2018-2019 academic year, I was the Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where I conducted sustained research on the long history of how Ethiopia is represented in European and American literature from the 15th century to the present.
Blogs: Theory Teacher's Blog, Film and Media, and Atlantic Literature