Lizzie Harris McCormick joined the English Department at LaGuardia in the fall of 2009. She recently finished her dissertation “Proteus of the Mind: The Creative Imagination in Literature and Psychology at the Fin de Siècle,” and is at work on revising it into a book. Covering the time period from Darwin to Freud, her project looks at the ways late Victorian psychologists and biographers described the operations of the creative mind. It then compares these ideas to the ways “fantastic” fiction writers - such as Oscar Wilde, Rachilde and Una Ashworth Taylor - showed creativity working. She has presented papers at various conferences such as the Modern Language Association, North Eastern Modern Language Association, College English Association, and the Stony Brook Annual Conference on Writing, to name a few. In addition, she was one of the founding editors of Tarpaulin Sky journal and press and has published her own poems in several print journals. She is an avid cook, dog lover and painter in her free time.

Schools attended: Bennington College (B.A.); City University of New York (M.Phil., Ph. D).

Areas of Specialization: Victorian and Edwardian Literature; Literature and Science; Ancient Literature (and its relation to our world); Monster Fiction; and Gender and Sexuality in Literature.

Favorite Quote: "Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." – William James

Authors I love to teach: Euripides, Ovid, Homer, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, W. B. Yeats, Henry James, William Blake, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Bernadette Meyer, Anne Winter, Ernest Dowson, Una Ashworth Taylor, Tennyson and John Donne.