Nicholas Birns
Adjunct InstructorNicholas Birns has taught at several institutions in the New York area and lectured abroad in Sweden, Australia, and China. He teaches classic and contemporary fiction and the major works of Western and world literature. He recently coedited The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel and is the author of The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space and The Literary Role of History in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Among his other books are Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from the 1950s to the Early Twenty-First Century, Understanding Anthony Powell, and Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead. He has contributed articles to The New York Times Book Review as well as Modernism/Modernity, Modern Language Quarterly, Partial Answers, and Studies in Romanticism
Currently Teaching
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
Seen as an artistic failure or an overgrown children’s book until the 1920s, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is now widely accepted as...
George Eliot¿s "Middlemarch" in the 21st Century
Dive deep into George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch
James Joyce's Ulysses
Rediscover James Joyce’s canonical work, Ulysses .
Parallel Lives: George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
Dive deep into George Eliot’s masterpiece, Daniel...
The Short Fiction of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges
Explore the two most ambitious and experimental short story writers of the modern...