Richard Dragan currently teaches Basic Writing, Composition I and II. In Spring 2007, he taught American Literature II, a survey of American Literature since 1865. Previous to LaGuardia, he taught a two-semester sequence on Great Works (with a World Literature focus) at Baruch College for several years. While in graduate school, he worked extensively in business and technical journalism publishing hundreds of articles for national magazines and websites. His work has been translated into 11 languages in print and online. Additionally, he has taught web design and computer technology at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education for over a decade.

He is busy revising his dissertation on the use of recent science for aesthetic effects in the encyclopedic novels of James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Richard Powers. He is collaborating on a cognitive science cluster for 2009 that will bridge 'the two cultures' of science and the humanities. He is circulating a manuscript of short stories, Words for a Mood, and is working on a new novel.

An avid amateur classical and jazz guitarist, he continues to arrange music, especially jazz standards and the music of J. S. Bach.

Schools Attended: Oberlin College (B.A. in English and Minor in History), Columbia University (M.A. in English and Comparative Literature, MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction), The Graduate Center / CUNY (Ph.D. in English). Areas of Specialization: 20th/21st Century British and American Literature, Modernism and Postmodernism, Science and Literature, James Joyce, Anglophone Literature, Creative Writing—Fiction, Journalism. A Favorite Quote: "What two temperaments did they individually represent? The scientific. The artistic." --James Joyce, "Ithaca," Ulysses (1922).

Authors I Have Taught At LaGuardia: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Alice Walker, Ha Jin, Amy Tan, John Ashbery, Alice Munro, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Wright, Derek Walcott.