Culleton, Claire A.

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Culleton, Claire A.

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Manhattan College, B.A., 1981; University of Tennessee, M.A., 1985; University of Miami, Ph.D., 1989.

ADDRESSES: Office—Kent State University, Department of English, 302-D Satterfield Hall, Kent, OH, 44242. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, 1989–90, instructor; Kent State University, Kent, OH, assistant professor, 1990–95, associate professor, 1995–2000, professor of English, 2000–, graduate program chair, 1998–2000, graduate studies coordinator, 2000–02. Postdoctoral fellowship, University of Miami, 1990; Visiting scholar, University College, London, 1996. Member of editorial board, Names: The Journal of the American Name Society, 1995–2004.

MEMBER: International James Joyce Foundation, National Council for Teachers of English, American Conference for Irish Studies, American Name Society, Modern Language Association, Modernist Studies Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Professor of the Year award, University of Miami, 1990; award for professional development, Kent State University, 1997; University Distinguished Teacher award, Kent State University Alumni Association, 1999; "Gold Slip" Honors Faculty Teaching Award, Honors Alumni Association, 2000; Andrew W. Mellon fellowship, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, 2000.

WRITINGS:

Names and Naming in Joyce, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1994.

Working-Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Joyce and the G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover's Manipulation of Modernism, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2004.

Editor of "New Directions in Irish and Irish-American Literature" series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005–. Contributor to books, including ReJoycing: New Readings of "Dubliners," edited by Rosa M. Bollettieri Bosinelli and Harold F. Mosher, Jr., University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1998; and Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality, edited by Susan Shaw Sailer, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 1997. Contributor to periodicals, including James Joyce Literary Supplement, James Joyce Quarterly, and Yeats Eliot Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A book on the cultures of workers' schools in the United States from 1900.

SIDELIGHTS: Claire A. Culleton, a professor of English at Kent State University, writes widely on twentieth-century Irish, British, and American literature. In her 1994 title Names and Naming in Joyce, Culleton examines the works of modernist writer James Joyce, focusing particularly on his 1914 short-story collection Dubliners. "Culleton separates the activity of naming in Joyce into various critical contexts that involve important theoretical issues—and she does so without falling into theory's own abstract nominalizations," observed Studies in Short Fiction contributor Roy Gottfried. In one example, Culleton demonstrates that the names Kathleen Kearney and Hoppy Holohan, characters in "The Mother," bear similarities to the name Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the title character in a 1904 Irish drama. Calling Names and Naming in Joyce "an important and fruitful book—clear, witty, and informative," Gottfried also noted that "Culleton demonstrates that every important concept of naming throughout all of Joyce's endeavor is to be found in the stories."

In Working-Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921 Culleton analyzes "the public perceptions and images of female industrial workers during the war, and how women workers themselves responded to the dominant social imagery, the realities and dangers of industrial work, and their identities as workers," according to Amy Bell, writing in Labour/Le Travail. In the book, Culleton presents an overview of women's factory work, addresses their dual roles as worker and as mother, and examines their writing efforts. "The most intriguing section of the book is the fourth chapter, an examination of munitions workers' factory newspapers," remarked Catherine Ellis in the Canadian Journal of History. "Culleton explains that women's wartime newspapers were originally modelled on soldiers' trench newspapers, but that women quickly began 'one-upping the male publications in terms of news, humor, artwork and overall quality.'" Bell similarly noted that Culleton "aims to trace the transformative and emancipatory effect of World War I on working women through their literary production, mainly in factory newspapers and autobiographies." Although Ellis and Bell both praised aspects of Culleton's book, they also felt that the author's background in English, not history, limits her narrative. "Had Culleton focused her sights more clearly on the fascinating body of working-class women's factory literature and provided deeper analysis of these texts, the result would have been (from an historian's perspective) a much more challenging and rewarding book," Ellis concluded.

An unlikely connection between James Joyce and J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972, is the subject of Culleton's 2004 title Joyce and the G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover's Manipulation of Modernism. Culleton, who requested Joyce's FBI file during the 1990s, discovered that Hoover and his agents engaged in a systematic program of harassment and intimidation of a number of modern writers, including Joyce, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, and Langston Hughes. "Hoover's impact on writers, publishers, agents, periodical editors—and the reading public—was considerable," wrote Choice reviewer Q. Grigg, and Library Journal contributor William D. Walsh observed that throughout Joyce and the G-Men, "Culleton muses about what Modernism could have been without Hoover's endless bullying and political shenanigans."