Josie P. Campbell

Professor of English, Women's Studies, Comparative Literature, and the Allan Shawn Feinstein College of Continuing Education

Editor of ATQ

Director of Graduate Studies

PhD Pennsylvania State University
MA University of Rhode Island
BA Dickenson College

Office: 175D Swan Hall
Phone: 401-874-4664
E-mail: graddir@etal.uri.edu
Office Hours: Mon, Tues, and Wed by appointment

Josie Campbell was trained in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, with a concentration in drama; she has published on both medieval and Shakespearean drama. She began to publish more broadly in the 1980s and 90s, writing on contemporary Canadian women writers, such as Margaret Atwood, and the Guadeloupe writer, Simone Schwartz-Bart, as well as on American writers such as E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Mary Lee Settle, and others. She has written widely on uses of folklore and myth in contemporary writing, and has published books not only on medieval literature but also on the writers Zora Neale Hurston and John Irving.

Campbell is presently writing a biography of three ordinary women who lived extraordinary lives, spanning the period from the late 1800s to the year 2000, with special attention paid to gender and to material culture, such as cookbooks, quilts, diaries, journals, and photographs. The very question of what makes biography comes into play as well.

Courses taught by Campbell include Eng 242, 280, 381, 399, 472, and 510. She has taught courses on the American West, on Medieval Romance, and on Jacobean comedy. She also teaches courses in Women's Studies, in Film and Literature, and Comparative Literature.

She served as Chair of the Journalism Department (1985-88) and as Associate Chair of the English Department (1989-90). She has been a Visiting Professor at Penn State and Dickinson College, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hampden-Sydney College, as well as a consultant on Women's Studies at the Penn State Branch Campus System. She was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship on Interdisciplinary Study and Philosophy in 1974-75, and of various research grants in the 1980s and 90s from the Canadian Government, as well as from the URI Council for Research and the URI Foundation. During this period, she was also a recipient of a Folger Library Fellowship and a participant in the Folger Library's seminars on Shakespeare.

Professor Campbell is currently Senior Editor of ATQ: A Journal of 19th-Century American Literature and Culture.  She is also the Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department.