
Richard Dragan currently teaches Basic Writing, Composition I and II. In Spring 2007, he taught American Literature II, a survey of American Literature since 1865. Previous to LaGuardia, he taught a two-semester sequence on Great Works (with a World Literature focus) at Baruch College for several years. While in graduate school, he worked extensively in business and technical journalism publishing hundreds of articles for national magazines and websites. His work has been translated into 11 languages in print and online. Additionally, he has taught web design and computer technology at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education for over a decade.
He is busy revising his dissertation on the use of recent science for aesthetic effects in the encyclopedic novels of James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Richard Powers. He is collaborating on a cognitive science cluster for 2009 that will bridge 'the two cultures' of science and the humanities. He is circulating a manuscript of short stories, Words for a Mood, and is working on a new novel.
An avid amateur classical and jazz guitarist, he continues to arrange music, especially jazz standards and the music of J. S. Bach.
Schools Attended: Oberlin College (B.A. in English and Minor in History), Columbia University (M.A. in English and Comparative Literature, MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction), The Graduate Center / CUNY (Ph.D. in English). Areas of Specialization: 20th/21st Century British and American Literature, Modernism and Postmodernism, Science and Literature, James Joyce, Anglophone Literature, Creative Writing—Fiction, Journalism. A Favorite Quote: "What two temperaments did they individually represent? The scientific. The artistic." --James Joyce, "Ithaca," Ulysses (1922).
Authors I Have Taught At LaGuardia: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Alice Walker, Ha Jin, Amy Tan, John Ashbery, Alice Munro, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Wright, Derek Walcott.
Recent and Upcoming Conference Papers: - "Falling Men: Realistic and Postmodern Terror and Wonder in DeLillo and McEwan's Recent Fiction and James Marsh's Man on Wire." Don DeLillo in the Twenty-First Century Conference, Don DeLillo Society, Louisville, KY, February 2009.
- "Close Reading Matters: Explicating American Literature by Urban Community College Students." Close Reading Conference, NYCEA, St. Bonaventure University, Buffalo, NY, October 2008.
- "Darwin on the Balloon: Reading Evolutionary Science in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love." Revolution and Literature / Evolution and Literature Conference, NYCEA, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, April 2007.
- "Leaving the Bronx: Don DeLillo's Modern and Postmodern Cities in His Early Fiction." Literature and the City Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, March 2006.
- "Mind-Body Problems: Science and Triangulating Desire in the Work of Richard Powers and Jeanette Winterson. " Locating Love Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, March 2004.
Contributing Editor: PC Magazine