Welcome

My name is Samantha Lepak. I teach writing, literary studies, poetry, and literary analysis at Loyola University Chicago.

My research interests are broad, but currently my project focuses on intersections between ancient Greek/Roman mythmaking and modernist women’s writing. My principal interest is in the American poet Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle and her circle. I find H.D. an exemplar of the kind of intersecting between ancient and modern that I discuss and argue for, and her prose and poetry both have a unique, fascinating quality that very capably bridges between worlds.

In my dissertation project, I blend this interest with an argument for a new type of queer temporality using the work of renowned queer theorists including Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman, José Estéban Muñoz, Susan Stanford Friedman, and others. I argue that through this connection between ancient Greek and modern American/European, female modernist authors create a lineage for themselves through literary figures to fill the gaps in literal, concrete literary ancestry that is occupied by exclusionary male authors. This results in a fascinating view of temporality that is simultaneously linear and cyclical, which I am calling “palimpsestic temporality.”

My pedagogical work is informed by and participates in several subfields:

• cultural and visual rhetorics
• gender and sexuality studies
• women’s poetry
• feminist theory and pedgaogy
• modernism and queer modernism
• c19-c20 American and British literature
• trauma theory
• student-focused creative cultivation
• Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythologies
• queer theory
• ancient and modern philosophies