Join us Monday Feb. 17 at 7pm at 101 Archer!
What do spies and professors share? In the case of one renowned professor and pioneer of American studies departments across the world, they share a name: Norman Holmes Pearson. OCH is excited to welcome Greg Barnhisel to 101 Archer to talk about how Pearson worked for the CIA while professing American values in the classroom.
Dr. Barnhisel is a Professor of English and has been at Duquesne University since 2003. In both his classes and his research, he is interested in exploring how a society’s institutions—from its schools to its governmental agencies to its museums—shape how people create and understand creative literature. He regularly takes students to Ireland for a short-term study-abroad class about modern Irish literature, and also enjoys bringing students on field trips in the city of Pittsburgh to learn more about the art and culture of the city. His writing classes emphasize how we write to develop and improve our critical thinking, and so research and drafting are central to his teaching. He has published two textbooks for first-year writing classes that implement these ideas.
He is the author of three books, including James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015), and Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power (2024), and has published widely in scholarly journals. In addition, he is the editor of two anthologies about publishing, literature, and the Cold War (Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (2010) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures (2022)) and has been editor of the scholarly journal Book History since 2014. He has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University, Harvard University, Princeton University, the Australian National University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Foundation.
Dr. Barnhisel also enjoys writing for a general audience beyond scholars and professors, and has published articles and reviews on history, literature, art, and music in venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, the New Republic, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Public Books, Mental Floss, and the Pittsburgh City Paper.
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