F A C U L T Y S P O T L I G H T Exploring American Literature A AN D R EW L E I T E R , PH. D . PROFESSOR OF ENGL I SH D I RECTOR OF THE HUMAN I T I ES RESEARCH CENTER fter completing his undergraduate degree, Andrew Leiter, Ph.D., taught English as a second language for a couple of years to Japanese junior high school students in Narashino, Japan. “I pursued that job less out of a passion for teaching than out of a desire to explore the world beyond the American South where I grew up,” he says. It was an amazing experience and one that definitely broadened his horizons, but it also fostered his initial interest in teaching. “My love for literature and the new experience of teaching led me to graduate school where I could bring both together and pursue a career at the collegiate level. I am a lucky person. I get to do what I enjoy most for a living, and I get to share that passion with bright young minds in the Lycoming College classroom.” Leiter’s expertise is in American literature and culture with particular emphasis in modern American literature (between the world wars), African American literature, and the literary and popular representations of the American South. He has published essays on William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Jean Toomer, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as “In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances” (LSU Press, 2010). He is editor of “Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals Since the 1970s” and co-editor (with Christopher Rieger) of “Faulkner and Hurston,” “Faulkner and Hemingway,” and “Faulkner & García Márquez.” When did you first become interested in English literature? I loved to read from as early as I can remember. I was one of those kids who always had a book in his hands, and I’d immerse myself for hours on end in other people’s worlds and experiences. Those reading habits became my gateway into other interests in history, philosophy, religion, and cultural anthropology, which I explored in high school and college. Ultimately, I settled into an English major probably because studying literature not only allowed me to enjoy great books, but also provided access points to so many other aspects of culture and human identity. Take, for example, a novel like “The Great Gatsby,” one of the most familiar works in American literature. It is artistically compelling with memorable characters, but it also engages the newly developing field of psychology, the impact of World War I on American society, the cultural revolution of the New Woman, the technological impact of the automobile, America’s racial history, as well as materialism and notions of the American dream, and much more. 20 LYCOMING COLLEGE 2022 SPRING MAGAZINE
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