Rate My Professor Paul Peppis

Paul Peppis is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Oregon and a scholar of Anglo-American modernisms in the Literature faculty. He earned a B.A. with honors in English from Williams College in 1984, an M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 1987, and a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 1993. After serving as a lecturer and instructor of graduate interns at the University of Chicago in 1993, he joined the University of Oregon Department of English in 1995 as Assistant Professor of Modern British Literature, advancing to Associate Professor in 2001 and Professor in 2014. Peppis held significant administrative roles, including Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2003 to 2006, Associate Department Head from 2006 to 2008 and 2009 to 2015, Interim Director of the Oregon Humanities Center from 2013 to 2014, and Director of the Oregon Humanities Center from 2014 until his retirement in June 2024.

An award-winning teacher, Peppis received the Thomas F. Herman Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2012, the Junior Professorship Development Award in 2000, the New Faculty Award in 1996, and an Oregon Humanities Center Research Fellowship. His scholarship examines relations between early twentieth-century literature and cultural productions, reassessing modernism's engagements with social, political, scientific, and popular movements of the era; he is currently completing a book project titled Popular Modernisms. Key publications include the monographs Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Prominent articles are Re-gendering Smart Classicism: Franklin P. Adams, Dorothy Parker, and the Middlebrow Classical Verse Revival (Modernist Cultures, 2022), Popular Modernism in the Late Krazy Kat Comics: Industry and Innovation in the Color Sundays (Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 2018), Querying and Queering Golden Age Detection: Gladys Mitchell's Speedy Death and Popular Modernism (Journal of Modern Literature, 2017), and Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology (Modernism/Modernity, 2002). He contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007) and The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster (2007), co-edited Western Humanities Review 74.3 (2020), and has served on the editorial board of Journal of Modern Periodical Studies since 2008. His research interests encompass Comics and Cartoon Studies, Cultural Studies, Irish Literary Studies, Modernism Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity, and The Novel. Peppis has provided extensive service on university committees and advocated for the humanities through leadership at the Oregon Humanities Center.