Research and Interest Areas

Dr. Samuel Lyndon Gladden obtained his B.A. degree from the University of Texas and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Texas A&M University, where he won several teaching and research awards and where he spent the 1997-1998 academic year completing a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. From 1998-2000, he worked as an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia State University, where he developed and taught a variety of courses in literature and writing, directed a lecture series, and organized a film series focusing on issues of race and identity. Since joining the UNI faculty in the fall of 2000, Dr. Gladden has taught a variety of courses in nineteenth-century British literature and literary theory at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In addition to teaching, he has published a book, a number of articles, and a handful of encyclopedia entries and book reviews; he has participated in conferences at the local, national, and international levels; he has chaired the Senate of the Department of English Language and Literature and the committee for the 2005-2006 Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series; he has served on the advisory boards and faculty for both the Honors Program and the Women's and Gender Studies Programs and as the liaison to the Dean for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts Dean’s Scholars; he has served as sponsor for the English Club; and he has hosted the KUNI / KHKE radio show Critics' Roundtable.  In the department of English Language and Literature, Dr. Gladden serves as Coordinator of Graduate Studies in English, and has served as the Chair of the Department’s Professional Assessment Committee (for general information about UNI’s faculty evaluation procedures, see the Master Agreement).

Dr. Gladden's most recent book, an edition of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, will be published in April, 2009, by Broadview Press.  His other publications include a book, Shelley's Textual Seductions: Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works (Routledge, 2002), as well as articles on Percy Shelley (in Romantic Circles Praxis Series), Mary Shelley (in Studies in Romanticism), Wilkie Collins (in Victorian Literature and Culture), Bram Stoker (in English Language Notes), Mary Shelley and Andy Warhol (in Interdisciplinary Humanities), and Oscar Wilde (in Victorians Institute Journal and in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde, a volume in the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series to be published in December, 2008).  Dr. Gladden is also a contributor to Homo Narrans:  Texts and Essays in Honor of Jerome Klinkowitz (Jagiellonian UP, 2004).

At present, Dr. Gladden is at work on two book projects:  a textbook on argument and visual culture, “Envisioning Argument,” which he is co-writing with Dr. Joanna Gibson of Texas A&M University for McGraw-Hill; and a monograph tentatively entitled “Lacunae and Textual Consummation: Absences, Gaps, and Other Sexy Spaces in the British Nineteenth Century,” the concluding chapter of which appeared in the “Ghosts of the Victorian” special issue of Victorians Institute Journal in 2004. In the spring of 2004, Dr. Gladden was named a lifetime member of The Oxford Round Table, and he presented a lecture to that group titled “Unacknowledged Legislation:  American Civil Rights and the Vanishing Points of Tyranny.”  In the spring of 2005, Dr. Gladden was invited to deliver a lecture for “Voicings,” a conference at St. Cloud State University, where spoke on “Weird Soundings:  The Canny Uncanny in Wilde, Warhol, and Wainwright.”  In 2006, he co-presented a paper at UNI’s conference on Camouflage:  Art, Science, and Popular Culture with Dr. Harry Brod of the Department of Philosophy and Religion.  In the Spring of 2007, he presented a lecture to UNI’s History Honor Society entitled “The Criminal In-Visible:  Image as Evidence in Nineteenth-Century England,” and he presented  his work on The Importance of Being Earnest to the History Club in the Fall of 2007.  In the Spring of 2009, Dr. Gladden will present his work on the uncanny to the department’s creative/intellectual forum “The Usual Third.”  At present, Dr. Gladden has several essays under consideration for publication, including scholarship about Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft, the detection of criminality and the identification of “the criminal type” in nineteenth-century England, and the experience of the uncanny in the twenty-first-century world.