Dr. Helen May Dennis
Please note Dr Dennis has retired from taught course teaching.
General
BA (York), DPhil (York); D.Phil. A New Approach to the Poetry of Ezra Pound: Through the Medieval Provençal Aspect. University of York, awarded July 1981; B.A. Honours Degree in English and Related Literature. University of York. October 1969 -July 1972; Merchant Taylors’ Girls School, Crosby, Liverpool 23 (Harrison Scholar). 1962-69. Member of British Association of American Studies, Ezra Pound Association, Higher Education Academy. Member of Editorial Board for Literature Compass and The Warwick Review. Founder of University of Warwick Contemporary Poetry Archive (1981-4). Recipient of various grants to develop curriculum for Centre for Lifelong Learning and for Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies.
Research interests
Twentieth-century American poetry, especially Ezra Pound and poets who constitute his legacy; North American women writers, especially Willa Cather, H.D., Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich; Native American and mixed-blood authors writing in English during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has a particular interest in theories of memory as applied to literary texts and concepts of place and cultural space. She is also interested in poetics and prosody. She has published on Native American Literature, including a recent co-authored article on Leslie Marmon Silko "Seeking the Ecospace," Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Willa Cather, Gender in American Literature and Culture, Ezra Pound and Medieval Provençal. Her poetry has been published in a number of small press publications since the late 1970s, including in the collection, Bluebeard’s Wives, 2007 and in Hearing Voices, Horizon and Raw Edge. She is currently working on her mother's memoirs and her own poetry.
Selected publications
'Adrienne Rich: Introducing the Selected' in Selected Poems from Modernism to Now (Cambridge Scholars, 2012)
Native American Literature: Towards a Spatialized Reading (Routledge, 2007)
Ed. Ezra Pound and Poetic Influence (Rodopi, 2000)
Teaching and supervision
She has taught 20th-century American Literature with specific interests in modernism and gender, twentieth-century North American Women Writers, Native American literature and culture, and the literature of the American Southwest. She has supervised graduate work on Nina Bawden, Anita Brookner, Mary Daly, Emily Dickinson, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Sarah Orne Jewett, Georgia O’Keeffe, Toni Morrison, Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, Jean Rhys, Dorothy Richardson, Bonnie Greer, Jackie Kay, Lesley Marmon Silko, Cormac McCarthy, Gertrude Stein, the Southern Anti-Tom Tradition 1852-1902, Chicana writing since the 1960s, Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Australian Aboriginal Poetry, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Gerald Vizenor and on the theme of violence in Native American Literature.
