Rate My Professor James Wurtz

Dr. James F. Wurtz is Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Department of English at Indiana State University, where he joined the faculty in 2005. He began his academic career there as an assistant professor, as noted in university announcements from 2010, advanced to associate professor, and was promoted to department chairperson in 2021, according to Board of Trustees records. Wurtz holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a minor in Creative Writing from John Carroll University. He earned his Master of Arts in Irish Studies from the University of Notre Dame in 2003 and his Doctor of Philosophy in Irish Studies with a focus in English from the same institution in 2005.

Wurtz teaches a range of courses including Literary Analysis, Literature & Ideas, Literary Theory & Criticism, comics and graphic novels, Irish literature, modernism, and British literature. His research specializations include 19th- and 20th-century Irish Studies, modernism, memory, violence in literature, and graphic narratives. Key publications feature the article “Scarce More a Corpse: Famine Memory and Representations of the Gothic in Ulysses” in the Journal of Modern Literature (2005) and “Representing the Great War: Violence, Memory, and Comic Form” (2009). He has contributed to scholarly works such as Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative: Essays on Forms, Structures and Identities. Wurtz has delivered public lectures, including the Landini Series talk “Batman’s Dark Night of the Soul: Space and the Spatial in Arkham Asylum” in 2010, and presented at conferences on topics like trauma and melancholy in Edward Thomas’s “Rain” and mythic elements in Promethea. He serves as faculty advisor for Arion, the student creative writing magazine, completed the Master Teacher certification through the Faculty Center for Teaching Excellence, and participated in the Arts Endowment Committee. His commitment to teaching emphasizes student growth, wide reading, and personal engagement with faculty.