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Faculty


I've been teaching at SUNY Potsdam for more than twenty years, having started in the fall of 2001. Since that time, I've taught 131 sections of 53 different courses, ranging from introductory courses in literature and composition to specialized upper-division and graduate seminars in various topics related to (mostly) contemporary fiction. A full list of what I've taught here can be found on my CV.

Over the course of those two-plus decades, I've also kept myself busy with a range of scholarly projects, the majority of which have some connection to the topic of satire. My first book, Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2011), is a substantially revised version of my doctoral dissertation and remains the only scholarly book to compare Russian and American literature during the Cold War. My subsequent books -- Understanding Colson Whitehead (Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2014, rev. ed. 2021) and Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire (Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2019) -- examine the work of a pair of brilliant contemporary American authors. My current work-in-progress -- Counteracting Erasure and "Unvisibility": Constructions of Empowered Black Identity in Contemporary American and Canadian Fiction -- will be the first comparative study of contemporary African American and Black Canadian authors upon publication.

I have also edited or co-edited a number of other books that have opened the window through which I look at the contemporary world even wider. Along with the late and deeply missed Owen E. Brady of Clarkson University, I co-edited Finding a Way Home: Critical Essays on Walter Mosley (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008). My SUNY Potsdam colleague James J. Donahue and I have co-edited a pair of collections of new scholarship on contemporary African American satire, Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2014) and Greater Atlanta: Blackness and Satire after Obama (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023).

Alongside these longer-form publications, I've also published dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and reference-work entries. I've produced more than fifty book reviews and have served as an external manuscript reviewer for more than a dozen scholarly journals and academic presses. I have been invited to give public lectures at institutions in Austria, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Turkey, and have presented my work at conferences throughout North America and Europe.

I have also served my department, my college, and SUNY Potsdam as a whole in a wide range of administrative capacities.

My full CV and excerpts from my published and unpublished scholarly work can be found at https://potsdam.academia.edu/DerekCMaus.