TRAVISANO, Thomas (J.) 1951-

PERSONAL: Born December 14, 1951, in Livingston, NJ; son of Frank (a manufacturer, sales representative, and inventor) and Nancy (a homemaker; maiden name, Drees) Travisano; married Elsa Thompson, May 23, 1981; children: Michael, Emily. Education: Haverford College, B.A., 1973; University of Virginia, M.A., 1975, Ph.D., 1981. Hobbies and other interests: Listening to classical music, computers, baseball, cooking.

ADDRESSES: Home—28 State St., Oneonta, NY 13820. Offıce—Department of English, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY 13820. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, assistant professor of English, 1980-82; Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, assistant professor, 1982-88, associate professor, 1988-93, professor, 1993-96, Cora A. Babcock Professor of English, 1996—. National Endowment for the Humanities, director of American Century Project, 1995-97; guest lecturer at colleges and universities, including University of Reading, Vassar College, University of Maine, University of Louisville, and Siena College.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, American Literature Association, Elizabeth Bishop Society (president, 1997—), Macintosh User Group of Oneonta (MUG ONE; president, 1992-94).

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities, grants, 1989, 2000, fellowship, 1994-95; Culpeper grant for technology in pedagogy, 1996-97.

WRITINGS:

Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1988.

Expulsion from Paradise: Elizabeth Bishop, 1927-1957 (monograph), Anchorage Press (Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada), 1995.

(Editor, with Margaret Dickie, and contributor) Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1996.

Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1999.

(Editor, with Steven Gould Axelrod and Camille Roman, and contributor) The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volume 1: Traditions and Revolutions: Beginnings to 1900, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Elizabeth Bishop: Geography of Gender, edited by Marilyn May Lombardi, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1993. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Georgia Review, New Literary History, Wallace Stevens Review, Western Humanities Review, and Gettysburg Review. Editor, Elizabeth Bishop Bulletin, 1991-97; contributing editor, Listener, 1995-2000.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Complete Letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, for Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY).

SIDELIGHTS: Thomas Travisano once told CA: "I write to answer my own questions. I am drawn to explore literary subjects that are rife with unanswered questions or plagued by persistent misreadings and misunderstandings, and that invite the possibility of fresh discovery. I am primarily influenced by the creative work of the poets I am studying—I try to model my critical method on their ways of creating literature—and by the critical work of colleagues of my own generation, especially colleagues in the field of Bishop studies. Despite a lot of 'dreck' issuing from the academic presses, I believe the generation presently entering middle age is one of the most interesting critical generations yet to emerge from American (and international) universities.

"I tend to approach the act of critical writing through an immersion in primary texts. That is, I immerse myself in the literary works themselves, which I try to anatomize in terms of form and function. At the same time, I immerse myself in as much related primary material as I can uncover: letters, drafts, journals, workbooks, unpublished writings, and so forth—the cluttered desk from which the finished work finds its way into print. This entails many visits to the rare book and manuscript archives. I also attempt a similar immersion in the cultural contexts out of which the writing emerged.

"My inspiration to write has so far derived from my excitement about poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman, who seem to be doing something extraordinarily fresh and original, combined with my frustration over prevailing modes of reading these poets, which are often stale and ridden by distortions, clichés, and half-baked assumptions that hamper a direct response to the work."