William Mishler’s article on Ibsen’s Brand is an adaptation of a paper delivered in the COV&R section of the American Academy of Religion in November 1996. The other three articles have been adapted from papers delivered in the Generative Anthropology – Religion lecture series in Spring 1997 sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA by Doug Collins, Tom Bertonneau, and Matt Schneider.
Douglas Collins, a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board, teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of Sartre as Biographer, as well as articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century French literature.
Matthew Schneider, a founding member of the GA seminar (who has managed to attend some portion of the seminar every year it has been given) holds an MA from Chicago and received his PhD in English from UCLA in 1991. The author of Original Ambivalence: Violence and Autobiography in Thomas De Quincey (Peter Lang, 1995), Schneider has also published articles on Jane Austen, John Keats, and critical theory. He has recently been promoted to Associate Professor of English (with tenure) at Chapman University (Orange, California).
Tom Bertonneau, another original member of the GA seminar, received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Comparative Literature in 1990. His dissertation applied GA to the study of the modern epic: William Carlos Williams’ Paterson and Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés…” Since then he has published and presented papers on Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, and other American authors, as well as on theoretical topics (and science fiction). Tom has also written for Heterodoxy, Chronicles, Academic Questions, and National Review, and is well known in Michigan for his controversial writings on college English teaching. He currently teaches English at Central Michigan University.