Assistant Professor English
Kirby Hall Room 328
Phone: 201.559.6112
Email: craftp@felician.edu
Positions Held
- Felician College, Assistant Professor of English, 2011-present
- Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), English Lecturer, 2010-2011
- University of Indianapolis, English Lecturer, 2010-2011
- University of Illinois, Liebmann Fellow, 2007-2010; English Instructor, 2001-2007
Academic Accomplishments
- PhD, M.A., University of Illinois
- BA, Hanover College
Biography
Dr. Craft was born in Indiana, and he has lived in Illinois, Washington, D.C., and Belgium, where he learned to speak fluent French as a Rotary Exchange Student. He enjoys reading, traveling, exercising, movies, guitar, singing, and Italian food.
Field(s) of Interest/Expertise
Dr. Craft studies early modern and eighteenth-century literature. He particularly enjoyed spending a summer at the Folger Shakespeare Library with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Courses Taught at Felician University
- CORE 375 Journey to Selfhood
- ENG 101 Writing the College Essay
- ENG 102 Introduction to the Study of Literature
- ENG 215 The Drama
- ENG 325 Milton
- ENG 330 Eighteenth-Century Literature
Publications/Research
- Warfare, Trade, and “Indians” in British Literature, 1652-1771
This study argues that Peter Heylyn’s critically neglected voyage narrative compilation (1652, eight editions before 1700) reveals vastly different British perceptions of “Indian” inhabitants of the Mughal Empire and the Americas. Current scholarship about literary depictions of wealth, power, and ethnicity in works by Milton, Behn, Dryden, and Defoe will therefore be reassessed in relation to Heylyn’s Cosmographie and the contemporary voyage narratives that shaped British views of “Indians.” - ‘The Doves Are Censured, While the Crows Are Spared’: Steele’s 1711 Inkle and Yarico Adaptation. Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies (forthcoming, 19 manuscript pages).
- Peter Heylyn’s Seventeenth-Century English Worldview. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (forthcoming, 27 manuscript pages).
- The Contemporary Popular Reception of Shadwell’s A True Widow Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 24.1 (2009): 5-16
- Dryden’s Transformation of Bernier’s Travels Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700_ 33.2 (2009): 47-55
- Theodore de Bry’s Engraving of an Amerindian Ritual Folger.edu. Folger Institute, 31 May 2011. Web. 12 June 2011.
- Annotation of “Re-reading the Exclusion Crisis by Elizabeth Clarke. Routledge’s Annotated Bibliography of English Studies, 03 Apr. 2009. Web. 17 Oct. 2009
- Annotation of “‘About Savages and the Awfulness of America’: Colonial Corruptions in Humphry Clinker by Tara Ghoshal Wallace. Routledge’s Annotated Bibliography of English Studies, 30 Aug. 2008. Web. 17 Oct. 2009.
