Loretta Stec

Ph.D., Rutgers University.

Twentieth-Century Literature in English; Modernisms; Southern African Literature; Expatriate Writers in Paris; Women Writers; Journalism and Fiction; Atlantic Studies; Feminist Studies. Professor Stec teaches and conducts research in multiple fields of twentieth-century literature in English. She teaches courses on modernist writers including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and D.H. Lawrence. She has designed a two-course sequence on expatriate writers in Paris from the 1920s through the post-World War II period. Her course on Contemporary British Fiction brings her teaching into the 21st century. In addition, she teaches postcolonial studies with a focus on western and southern African fiction. A number of her courses are devoted to women writers and include a feminist theory component. Most also consider the cosmopolitan nature of literary and cultural production during the twentieth century. Professor Stec’s scholarship has included articles on: women and journalism in the interwar period; writing about Africa by British authors Naomi Mitchison, Winifred Holtby and Rebecca West among others; Virginia Woolf, feminism, and fascism; pacifist writers; didacticism in the fiction of Bessie Head; and the emerging canon of African writers. Forthcoming is an article on Claude McKay. She serves on the Advisory Board of the journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 and regularly reviews articles for the journal Twentieth-Century Literature. Professor Stec has long-standing connections to the field of Women’s Studies. She taught for the Women’s Studies Department at Rutgers University; received a Women’s Studies Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for her dissertation on the British writer Rebecca West and her milieu; and in 2000 was an Associate Fellow at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center housed at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts. During Spring 2004 and AY 2006-2007 Professor Stec was honored to serve as the Interim Chair of the Women Studies Department at San Francisco State University.

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