Thomas Oliver Beebee

Institutional Address:  
427 Burrowes Bldg. 
Penn State University
State College, PA 16802                                                                                                    
E-mail: tob@psu.edu                                           
Tel.: 814-863-4935 
FAX: 775-628-4863    

                                                                                                                               

EDUCATION     
1973-77
B.A. Dartmouth College (Summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) Major: Comparative Literature
     
1977-78
M.A. University of Michigan Field: Comparative Literature

1978-84
Ph.D. University of Michigan Field: Comparative Literature, Thesis: "Clarissa Betrayed: Continental Translations of Richardson’s Novel"

PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS          
1984-86
Assistant Professor of German, Bowdoin College

1986-92
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University

1992-
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University

Fall, 1993
Visiting Scholar (Fulbright), Department of English, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

2000-
Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University

2000-01
Visiting Scholar, Romance Languages, The Johns Hopkins University

PUBLICATIONS
Books:
Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1990. xi + 228 pp.

The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability. University Park: Penn State Press, 1994. viii + 303 pp.

Epistolary Fiction: in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x+277 pp.

True Imaginary Places: Landscapes of Nation in Modern European and American Fiction (220 pp.) Purdue UP Series in Comparative Cultural Studies, to appear 2008.

Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002. 350 pp. Oxford UP, to appear Sept. 2008.

Translation:
With Qing-yun Wu. The Remote Country of Women. By Bai Hua. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1994. 369 pp.

In Progress:
Transmesis: Inside Translation’s Black Box (200 pp. completed)
Citation and Precedent: Structural Couplings of German Law and Literature (180 pp. completed)

Selected Journal Articles (all refereed):     
"Ballad of the Apocalypse: Another Look at Bob Dylan's 'Hard Rain.'" Text and Performance Quarterly 11 (1991): 18-34.

"Johann Jakob Dusch and the Genealogy of Epistolary Fiction." JEGP 91.3 (July 1992): 360-82.

"The Letter Killeth: The Pli of Death in Jean-Paul Marat's Epistolary Fiction." Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, Philosophy of History 21.3 (Spring 1992): 217-41. Translated into Chinese as “Huoxing baocang: Lun Mala xiaoshuo zhong de siwang heihan.” Zhongwai Wenxue 263 (April 1994): 33-56.            

“The Fiction of Translation: Abdelkebir Khatibi’sLove in Two Languages.” Sub-stance 23.1 (1994): 63-78.

 “Talking Maps: Region and Revolution in Juan Benet’s Volverás a Región and Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões.” Comparative Literature 47.3 (Summer 1995): 193-214.

“The Rifled Mailbag: Robber as Reader in Epistolary Fiction." Revue de Littérature Comparée (Jan.-Mar. 1996): 14-36.

Joshua M. Getz and Thomas O. Beebee. “The Epistolary Politics of Amos Oz’s Black Box.” Prooftexts 18.1 (January 1998): 45-65.

Articles in journals (cont.):
“Tryptichs of Solipsism: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Fogo Morto by José Lins do Rego.” The Comparatist (1999): 63-88.

Thomas O. Beebee and Beverly Weber. "A Literature of Theory: Christa Wolf's Kassandra Lectures as Feminist Anti-Poetics." German Quarterly 74.3 (Summer 2001): 257-77.

"They Built Millennium: Jesuits and Guaranís 1610-1768." Zeitsprünge 6 (2002): 101-19.

“Ways of Seeing Italy: Landscapes of Nation in Goethe’s Italienische Reise and its Counter-Narratives.” Monatshefte 94.3 (2002): 322-45.

Thomas O. Beebee and Lenka Pankova. “Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars as Translational Fiction.” Serbian Studies 18.2 (2004): 339-59.

“Carl Schmitt and the Myth of Benito Cereno.” seminar 42.2 (May 2006): 114-35.

“Publicity, Privacy, and the Power of Fiction in the Gunning Letters.”Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20.1 (2007): 61-88.

“Inside the Black Box of Literary Translation: Transmesis.” Expressions (Mishima, Japan) 3 (2007): 24-44.

“Publicity, Privacy, and the Power of Fiction in the Gunning Letters.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20.1 (2007): 61-88.

“The Canudos Perplex: Three Early Factions.” Terra Roxa 10.2 (2007): 3-20.
<http://www2.uel.br/cch/pos/letras/terraroxa/index.php?option=com_
content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=40>

To appear:
 “Geographies of Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction.” CLCWeb, to appear 2008. 6000 words.

“Brazil without Brazilians: The Geopolitics of Amazônia in Márcio Souza’s Fiction.” CLCWeb, to appear 2008. 7000 words.

 Translation:                       
Co-translator with Qing-yun Wu. "I Think . . . ." By Zhan-chun Geng. Yearbook of General and Comparative Literature, 38 (1989): 120--33.

Selected Book Chapters:
“Letters of the Law: Rhetoric and Fiction in the Artes Dictaminis.” Action and Agency: Fourth Round Table on Law and Semiotics. Ed. Roberta Kevelson. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. 33-64.

"Bertolt Brecht's Legal Theater." In Law and Aesthetics. Ed. Roberta Kevelson. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. 37-67.

“Kant, Goethe, Benjamin, and the Law of Marriage.” Worldmaking. Ed. William Pencak. NY: Lang, 1996. 193-210.

“Epistolary Novel.” In Encyclopedia of the Novel: Vol. 1: A-L. Ed. Paul Schellinger. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. 384-8.

“Cathartic Thinking: Semiotics and Tragic Theory.” A Handbook of Semiotics. Ed. Roberta Kevelson. New York: Lang, 1998. 173-90.

"Rebellion in the Backlands." In World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 1: Latin-American Literature and its Times. Detroit: Gale Research Press, 1999. 431-43.

"The Öffentlichkeit of Jürgen Habermas: The Frankfurt School's Most Influential Concept?" Rethinking the Frankfurt School. Ed. Jeffrey Nealon and Karin Irr. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002). 187-204.

“Beyond Lecture and Discussion: The World’s Oldest Approaches to Literature.” Teaching World Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. New York: MLA, to appear 2008. 6000 words.

Book Reviews and Review Essays in: Biography ; Clio; Comparative Literature Studies; German Quarterly, Journal of English and Germanic Philology; Luso-Brazilian Review; Yearbook of General and Comparative Literature

 RECENT PAPERS AND SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS

 “The Lettered Woman: Variations on a Metaphor.” Invited lecture, California State University at Los Angeles, 12 May 1994.

“Is it Science? Some Mental Maps in Modern Literature and Criticism.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Convention, Athens, GA, March 1995.

“Between Word and Text: The Translating Fictions of Borges, Brossard, and Khatibi” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Convention, University of Notre Dame, April 1996.

“Cultural Memory and the Narrativization of Space.” The International Comparative Literature Association Triannual Convention, Leiden, The Netherlands, August 1997.

"Desert Landscape with Woman: Mary Austin, Nicole Brossard, and Joy Harjo Translate the American Southwest" ACLA Annual Convention, Austin, Texas, March 1998.

"The Y2K Bug, Caesar's Column , Canudos, Waco, Apokalypsis -- and You: Premillennarianism as a Transnational American Phenomenon." ACLA Annual Convention, Montreal, April 1999.

"They Built Millennium: Jesuits and Guaranis 1610-1768." The Fifth Annual Conference on Millennial Studies, Boston University, October 2000.

"Golden Flying Saucers: Ernesto Cardenal and Millennial Ufology." The Sixth Annual Conference on Millennial Studies, Boston University, November 2001.

“Kingdoms of This World: Defeated Millennium, Pseudo-Millennium, and Dystopic Millennium in Fiction of the Americas.” The Seventh Annual Conference on Millennial Studies, Boston University, November 2002.

“Transmesis and Postcolonial Reason.” ACLA Annual Convention, Ann Arbor, MI, April 2004.

“Inside Translation’s Black Box.” Conference on Critical Inquiry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, June 2004.

“Comparative Literature in the United States Today.” Remin University Conference on Chinese Studies, Beijing, June 2004.

“Creole Nation: Angola in the Fiction of José Eduardo Agualusa.” MLA Annual Convention, Philadelphia, December 2004.

“Colonial Letters: Towards a Taxonomy.” MLA Annual Convention, Washington, D. C., December 2005.

“From E-pistles to E-mail.” ACLA Annual Convention, Princeton, NJ, April 2006.

“What is Comparative Literature?” Series of five lectures delivered to the College of International Relations, Nihon University, Mishima, Japan, June 2006.

“The Four-Square City: The New Jerusalem as Proto-Urban Planning.” Talk given at the Symposium on Imaginary Cities, Penn State University, April 2007.

“Walter Bejamin and Contemporary Literary Theory.” Series of five invited lectures delivered to the College of the Humanities, State University of Londrina, Brazil, August 2007.

“Current trends in Cultural Studies.” Series of three lectures delivered to the Department of Foreign Languages, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, November 2007. (Also to the Department of Foreign Languages, National Sun-yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan).

 “Transmesis and Postcolonial Reason.” Invited lecture delivered to the Department of English, Taiwan National Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, November 2007.

EDITORIAL ACTIVITIES

Journal Boards: Comparative Literature Studies (1992- ); Terra Roxa (State University of Londrina, Brazil) Editor-in Chief, Comparative Literatures Studies (2001-  )

Referee for journals: CLCWeb; Comparative Literature Studies; College English; Eighteenth-Century Fiction; Social Dynamics (U of Capetown)

Reader for presses: Bucknell UP; Cambridge UP; Johns Hopkins UP; Penn State P; Purdue UP

GRADUATE THESES SUPERVISED
Seventeen doctoral dissertations (fourteen in Comparative Literature, three in German), and three master’s theses completed under my orientation, with three more in progress. Altogether, I have served on more than 30 Penn State doctoral dissertation committees in Comparative Literature, English, German, Spanish, Speech Communication, Art Education, and Geography.

GRANTS
1987
Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies Grant (Penn State). $3080
1988
Research Initiation Grant (Penn State) for research in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. $7000
1990
NEH Travel to Collections Grant for research in Paris, France. $750
1991
Jacobs Research Fellowship (Penn State); one semester teaching release. $7000
1991
Folger Institute Grant-in-Aid (to attend Folger Seminar and conduct research). $1367
1993
Fulbright Lecturing/Research Grant, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil. $21,000
1997
Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies Grant (Penn State) for research in Bahia, Brazil. $1500
1998-2000
Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies Term Fellowship. $6000

OTHER PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

1994-98
NEH Evaluation Committee: Summer Stipend Grants (French, German, and Slavic; again 2005-07)
1995-97
CIES Disciplinary Advisory Committee for Fulbright Scholar Awards (Comparative Literature)
2003- 
President, Phi Beta Kappa Lambda Chapter, Penn State University
2004-
Member, ACLA Advisory Board (3-year term)
1999- 
Representative of the ACLA to the Field Committee for the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage Project
2003- 
Member, ACLA Advisory Board

HONORS & AWARDS
1977
Phi Beta Kappa
1979
Delta Phi Alpha Honor Society for German Scholars, University of Michigan
1991
Honorary Inductee, Phi Sigma Iota Foreign Language Honor Society
1992
Class of 1933 Humanities Award, College of Liberal Arts, Penn State University
1993
Eisenhower Award for Excellence in Teaching, Penn State University