• Bartkowski, Frances
  • Professor
  • Department: Department of English - Newark
  • Tel: : (973) 353 5014
  • Office: 110 Warren St. Room 213

Website: https://www.francesbartkowski.com/

https://sasn.rutgers.edu/about-us/faculty-staff/frances-bartkowski


Education

Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of Iowa, 1982

M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of Iowa, 1978

M.L.S. in Library Science, University of Southern California, 1972

Diplôme in Etudes supérieures, Université de Caen, France, 1968

B.A. in French/ English, Montclair State College, NJ, 1969

Research Interests

Contemporary fiction, trauma and memory studies, feminist theory.

Biographical Notes

Frances Bartkowski was director of the RU-Newark Women and Gender Studies Program, the oldest such program at Rutgers, from 1989-2002. She served as chair of the Department of English from 2010-2016, and Interim Chair of the Arts, Culture and Media Department in 2019. She also works closely with graduate students in the American Studies doctoral program and the English Department master’s program.

In 2015 Bartkowski was awarded a $75,000 Chancellor's Seed Grant for her work with The Collaboratory at RU-N.

In 2013 Bartkowski team-taught a course about the HBO show The Wire with Sherri-Ann Butterfield, Professor of Sociology, and Executive Vice Chancellor. In a 2014 series of events inspired by that show and focused on Newark, Bartkowski and Professor Roland Anglin, director of the Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, interviewed Michael K. Williams (aka ”Omar”), one of four actors in The Wire who spoke at Rutgers during that year.

Bartkowski published her first novel, An Afterlife in 2018, and is also the author of Feminist Utopias, 1989; Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates, 1995; and Kissing Cousins: A Kinship Bestiary, 2008.

Frances Bartkowski has taught courses in feminist theory, literature and criticism, memoir and autobiography, travel writing, utopian fiction, 20th century American and European fiction, and authors Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather.

Bartkowski’s research interests include feminism, animal studies, trauma and memory studies.

Click here to view Professor Bartkowski's CV.

Selected Publications

Feminist Utopias, her first book, appeared in 1989 from University of Nebraska Press; Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement was published in 1995 by University of Minnesota Press; and Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary came out in 2008 from Columbia University press; http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14452-0/kissing-coursins. Her textbook, Feminist Theory: A Reader, co-edited with Wendy Kolmar of Drew University is scheduled for a 4th edition from McGraw-hill. She has published articles in Boundary 2, differences. Her articles include work on French post-structuralism, questions of the sublime, artists such as the photographer Diane Arbus and the painter Samuel Bak. She has also published essays in Tikkun, The New York Times. She Occasionally publishes poems, and is currently working on a novel, An Afterlife. Most recently she has been writing about the representation of animals in the visual arts; she is a member of the Animal Studies Group at NYU.

Courses Offered

Graduate English/Women’s and Gender Studies:

  • Feminist Theory/Queer Theory
  • Gender, Race and the Holocaust
  • Post-War European Novel
  • History of Feminist Thought
  • Introduction to Graduate Literary Study
  • Feminist Literary Criticism
  • Psychoanalysis and Feminism
  • Thinking Gender/Writing Feminism

Undergraduate English:

  • Humans and Other Animals
  • Post 9/11 Novel in America
  • Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison
  • Toni Morrison and Philip Roth
  • Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
  • Feminist Utopian Writing
  • The Novel in America
  • Fictions of Gender
  • Immigrant Autobiographies
  • Cultural Confrontations
  • English 102
  • 20th Century US Autobiographies
  • Women's Autobiographies
  • Women in Literature

Women's Studies:

  • Politics of Sexuality
  • Feminist Theory
  • Introduction to Women's Studies