Faculty Emeriti

Prior to retiring in 2010, I taught graduate and undergraduate courses in American literary modernism, including the work of writers such as Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, and William Carlos Williams. In addition, I designed and taught courses in the literature of the Vietnam War, environmental literature, and narrative theory.

These are also the fields in which I have done most of my research and publication. Since 2010 I have published chiefly poetry and a work of creative nonfiction, The Bark River Chronicles: Stories from a Wisconsin Watershed.

Publications

• Undivided Attention. Poetry Collection. Kelsay Books, 2025.
• Stand Still in the Light. Poetry collection. Finishing Line Press, 2019. Recognition: Pushcart Prize nomination.
• As They Were. Poetry chapbook. YellowJacket Press, 2018. Recognition: runner-up, Peter Meinke Poetry Prize
• Always on Fire. Poetry chapbook. Five Oaks Press, 2016. Recognition: Pushcart Prize nomination.
• The Bark River Chronicles: Stories from a Wisconsin Watershed. Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012.
• Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975, two volumes, Library of America, 1998 (co-editor). One-volume paperback edition with Foreword, 2000.
• The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. University of California Press, 1996. Recognition: Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in Literature for 1996-1998; Kenneth Kingery Scholarly Book Award, Council for Wisconsin Writers.
• Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book. Stanford University Press and the Huntington Library, 1989. Facsimile edition with transcription, introduction, and notes.
• Opus Posthumous, by Wallace Stevens. Revised, enlarged, and corrected edition. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Faber, 1990. Vintage-Random paperback, 1990.
• Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. University of California Press, 1985. Spanish translation, Fraterna, 1989. Recognition: New York Times Notable Book of 1985; Outstanding Achievement in Literature, Wisconsin Library Association.

Honors and Awards

• Writer of the Year Award, City of Marquette (MI) Arts and Culture Center (2020)
• Huntington Library Summer Research Fellowships (1978, 1979)
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships (1980, 1986-1987)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (1985)
• Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1989-1990)
• Fulbright Distinguished Lectureship, Beijing Foreign Studies University (2000)
• Fulbright Senior Lectureship, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2006)

I came to Marquette as a Victorianist and reader-response critic. My early research and publication was on Victorian periodical literature and the intersection of Victorian science, literature and values. My interest in Robert Louis Stevenson and Gothic literature in the late nineteenth century yielded Rituals of Dis-Integration (1993) as well as articles in Victorian Studies and elsewhere.

While in the department I taught all the British survey courses as well as individual author courses on John Henry Newman, Hopkins and Hardy, and Denise Levertov. My work on Newman culminated in a speakers' program and a collection of critical essays (1992) derived from it. From reader-response I moved to Gadamerian hermeneutical criticism and then the theo-dramatic theory of the late Swiss humanist and theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar.

In the department I taught the graduate history of criticism as well as the undergraduate course in literary criticism. While working on Balthasar, my research and teaching interests shifted to drama.  Since 2008 I have returned to a first love; lyric poetry.  I taught the Introduction to Poetry and the Creative Writing (Poetry) courses for two years.  I also co-taught a course on the Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton, whose friendship and correspondence provide a window on mid-twentieth century culture.

In the early 90s I contributed to and guest-edited issues of Renascence: Essays on Values and Literature, the scholarly journal that has been published at Marquette for over sixty years. For Renascence I interviewed novelist Larry Woiwode and contributed essays on Hans-Georg Gadamer and G. K. Chesterton. From 1995-2012 I edited the journal. That made me, perforce, a generalist in my tastes, and increasingly committed to the relation of literature to spirituality, religion, and belief. Under my editorship Renascence did special issues on Denise Levertov (whom I interviewed), Balthasar, Rene Girard, Graham Greene, Gabriel Marcel, and most recently Owen Barfield. As Senior editor, I edited a special issue on the work of novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson.

Courses Taught

• Poetry
• Drama
• Critical Theory
• Victorian Literature

Research Interests

• Denise Levertov and Gerard Manley Hopkins
• The fiction of Jon Hassler
• Hans Urs von Balthasar
• Drama, Poetry, Victorian literature

Publications

• Shell Dreams, Water's Edge Press, October 2021
• Jon Hassler - Voice of the Heartland, a Critical Appraisal of his Work, Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 2019.
• "A Grace-Filled Light: The transformational world of Jon Hassler,” America, 213 No. 6 Whole No. 5099 (September 14, 2015), pp. 30-32.
• “Denise Levertov: Artists, Pictures, Poems, and the Path to Conversion,” Renascence: Vol. LXVII (Spring, 2015), pp. 81-105.
• “Poem, Self, Voice and Spirit,” in “And have you changed your life?” The Challenge of Listening to the Spiritual in Contemporary Poetry, ed. Anne M. Pasero and John Pustejovsky, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2014, pp. 19-32.
• Review of You’ll Never Be Younger:A Good News Spirituality for those Over Sixty, by William J. O’Malley, S.J. U.S. Catholic Vol. 80 No. 7, July, 2015, p. 43.
• Published "Something Extraordinary: Denise Levertov's Perennial Appeal," America Vol. 211, no. 2, August 4-11, 2014, pp. 23-26.
• Edited "Critical Perspectives on Marilynne Robinson," Renascence, Vol. LXVI, no. 2, Spring, 2014.
• Received honorable mention for a poem, "Prairie Hours," in Poetry of the Sacred Contest, sponsored by the Center for Interfaith Relations, Louisville, KY. The poem will appear in the journal, Parabola, fall, 2014.
• “Drama and Catholic Themes,” in Teaching the Tradition: Catholic Themes in Academic Disciplines, ed. John J. Piderit, S.J. nd Melanie M. Morey (New York: OUP, 2012), pp. 131-151.
• “Dementia II” and “A Visit” (poems), Neurology Now online, Summer, 2012.
• “Temporary Help” (fiction) St. Anthony Messenger Vol. 120 no. 3 (August, 2012), pp. 46-49.
• “Autumn Mystery” and “Deserted Garden” (poems), World & I online, September, 2012.

• “'A Ransom of Cholers': Catastrophe, Consolation, and Consolation in Jon Hassler’s Staggerford, North of Hope, and “The Life and Death of Nancy Clancy’s Nephew,” a chapter in Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature, ed. Mary Reichardt (Catholic U A P, 2010).

• “Poetry, Attentiveness, and Prayer”. New Blackfriars, 2008.

• "Hans Urs von Balthasar and Some Contemporary Catholic Writers." LOGOS (Fall 2007).
• "G. K. Chesteron's Orthodoxy as Intellectual Autobiography." G.K. Chesterton: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom, 2006. (Reprint).
• Glory, Grace, and Culture: The Works of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Paulist Press, 2005.
• "The Plays of Peter Shaffer and the Mimetic Theory of René Girard." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. (Fall 2004).
• Rituals of Dis-Integration: Romance and Madness in the Victorian Psychomythic Tale. 1993.
• Critical Essays on John Henry Newman. University of Victoria, 1992.

Honors and Awards

• Invited to give the keynote address at the Jon Hassler Festival 2015, at Central Lakes State College, Brainerd, MN, June, 2015.
• Editor, Renascence 1995-2012; Senior Editor, 2012-present
• Invited presenter for week-long seminar, “Substantially Catholic,” Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY, June, 2008
• Mentor, Collegium: Colloquy on Religion and the Intellectual Life, 1995, 2000, 2003
• Marquette Summer Faculty Fellowships
• NEH Summer Fellowships
• Fulbright Fellowship to West Germany, 1972-73

My work centers on Middle English literature, with a leaning towards Early Modern English literature. I am very much engaged by the rich readings that result when the literature of the past is read through the lens of contemporary theories. For example, for the Middle Ages, 'truth' was never contingent; nevertheless the 'truth' of gender identification can be seen in medieval texts to be wickedly and comically negotiated. Perception, too, 'fixed' by Aquinas and Dante, proves to be shaped, rather, by institutional discourses, and can vary from community to community and period to period. Even meaning itself is constituted not by timeless truth but by language- itself a system of elusive and "excessive signification."

As my interests have evolved, so, too, have my courses, which now take a theme-based approach rather than a chronological one, an approach which seems to elicit the best from my students. Courses which I have developed in the last six years include “Language, Gender, and Power,” “Women, Money, and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England,” “Gender and Crime in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: Literary and Archival Sources,” “Gender and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama,” and “Violence in Representation and Representation in Violence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature.”

My evolving interests are reflected, likewise in my research. From my first book, The Old English Finding of the True Cross, I have crossed disciplines and have recently published a second book, Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman. There I show how medieval and early modern English women and women characters use certain linguistic strategies to de-'essentialize' the link between gendered practices and identity, and to invalidate knowledge systems that fail to account for women’s own subjectivities.

Religious Language: Privileging Violence towards Women is a third book, completed in first draft, in which I examine the ways in which the discourse of worship, religious treatises, homilies and liturgies (unconsciously) promotes the subjugation and abuse of women and children.

Courses Taught

• English Linguistics
• Medieval Literature
• Women's Studies

Research Interests

• English Linguistics
• Women in Medieval Literature

Publications

• The Old English Finding of the True Cross. Suffolk, Eng.: Boydell and Brewer Ltd., 1987. Edition, with linguistic and literary analysis of 11th-century Old English text of the Finding of the True Cross.

• Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman (2011)

• "Evidence for the Knowledge of Greek in Anglo-Saxon England." Anglo-Saxon England17 (1990) 217-246.
• “The Imagined Woman,” Image Makers and Image Breakers in the Middle Ages. Ed. J. Goering and Francesco Guilliano. Toronto Series, Vol. 6 (2004)
• "'I grab the microphone and move my body:' Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies and the Church's Attempt to Measure Holiness." The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers: Critical Essays. Ed Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe. Palgrave Press, 2007.
• "'Tak al my good [wealth] and lat my body go': Medieval Woman, Money and Power.” Women, Money and Power. Ed. Theresa Earenfight. Palgrave Press, 2008.

Honors and Awards

• British Fulbright Research Award
• National Endowment for the Humanities Award
• Summer Faculty Fellowship Award
• Invited: Fellow of the Departments of Anglo-Saxon Studies and Classics
• Faculty Development Award, Marquette University, 2007

My research interests include modern British poetry and contemporary literary theory. I am the author of a book on W.H. Auden's poetry as well as various articles that deal with Auden's prose, modern poetry and the romantic tradition, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Derrida from a phenomenological perspective, deconstruction, and the application of performative theory to literary texts. I have recently contributed to the Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden and am working on a study of Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

My graduate teaching interests range over modern and contemporary British poetry, the rhetorical models of Kenneth Burke, critical formalism in its Russian, New Critical, and poststructuralist modes, cultural criticism, postMarxism, and semiotics. Besides these and other accomplishments, I regularly throw a tennis ball for a finicky golden retriever.

Courses Taught

• 20th Century British Literature
• Literary Theory

Research Interests

• W.H. Auden
• Seamus Heaney

Courses Taught

• Rhetoric & Composition

The poetry of the English romantic poets, in particular Shelley and Wordsworth, has been my central professional concern.  The study of these poets has led me both backward and forward in time, backward through the centuries-long, polyglot tradition of Western poetry that they come out of and profoundly alter, and forward in time to such diverse continuers of their way with words as Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, and Adrienne Rich. As suggested by its title, my Rousseau in England: the Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (1979) closes with a picture of Shelley’s poetry as the enactment of a way of thinking that was even then, in 1822, being repressed and marginalized by the dominant intellectual and epistemological assumptions of modern Western culture.  Such philosophical preoccupations have led me to a cross-disciplinary engagement with the “ordinary language” philosophy practised in various ways by John Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell.  This lateral move into philosophy has eventuated into two recent books: The Constitution of Shelley’s Poetry: The Argument of Language in Prometheus Unbound (Anthem Press, 2009) and Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism (Bloomsbury, 2013). 

• Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism (Bloomsbury, 2013). 

• The Constitution of Shelley’s Poetry: The Argument of Language in Prometheus Unbound (Anthem Press, 2009)

• Rousseau in England: the Context for Shelley's Critique of the Enlightenment. California, 1979.

I have written a biography of Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish-American writer, editor, and controversialist, which Cambridge University Press will bring out as a 'featured book' in the spring of 2010. I teach classes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, Shakespeare, poetry, survey of American literature, you name it. Hobbies include painting with watercolor and pastel, listening to classical music, hiking and biking, and trying to keep my tennis game from deteriorating altogether.

Courses Taught

• Victorian and Edwardian Literature

Research Interests

• Nineteenth-century Literature
• Twentieth-century Literature

Publications

• Norman Podhoretz: A Biography.  Cambridge University Press. 2010.
• Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana. Palgrave, 2005
• The Norman Podhoretz Reader. Free Press, 2004. (Editor)
• "What They Talked About When They Talked About Literature." Commentary and American Life. Temple, 2005.
• "The Logic of Material Interests in Conrad’s Nostromo." Raritan (Fall 2003)
• "What Remains of Robert Lowell." Commentary (October 2003)
• "Nice Threads: Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott as Artist." Yale Review 89(Fall 2001).

Honors and Awards

• Bodman Foundation Grant
• The Bradley Foundation Grant
• Anonymous Foundation Grant

Dr. Krueger was interested in the "long nineteenth century" (c. 1780-1900) because the period faced so many of the same challenges we do today with such optimism and energy. That's one reason its writers, like Austen, Dickens, or Lewis Carroll remain popular. We're also prone to some of the long nineteenth century's vices—materialism, imperialism, sexism—and so can learn from the period's social critics, like Wollstonecraft, Gaskell, Hardy, and Wilde. Finally, nineteenth-century writers were the first mass-entertainers, providing generations of readers with Dr. Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, Black Beauty, and Alice in Wonderland.

In Dr. Krueger's various courses in Victorian Literature, Women and Literature, or Literature and Law, she wanted students to explore how and why a culture so close to our own turned to literature not only for entertainment, but social change as well. The questions that she found the most engaging, like this one, call for interdisciplinary responses. Dr. Krueger published on topics concerning gender, religion, law, and history in British culture, including The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago, 1992) Reading for the Law: Gender Advocacy and British Literary History (Virginia, 2010) and Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Ohio, 2002). 

Dr. Krueger served as a director of the University Core of Common Studies, past president of the scholarly organization Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies, and recipient of the inaugural Way-Klingler Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching.

Courses Taught

• Victorian Literature
• Literature and Law
• Women and Literature

Research Interests

• Victorian Literature
• Literature and Law

Publications

• “Queer Heroism in A Tale of Two Cities,” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 8.2 (summer 2012): Web.
• Reading for the Law: Gender Advocacy and British Literary History.  University of Virginia Press, 2010.
• The Encyclopedia of British Writers: Nineteenth Century. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2003. (Editor)
• Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002. (Editor)
• The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• “The Cost of Everything in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” Published Lecture. Los Angeles: UCLA, 2007.
• “Mary Anne Everett Green and the Calendars of State Papers as a Genre of History Writing.” Clio: a Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 36 (Fall 2006): 1-22.
• “Why She Lived at the PRO: Mary Anne Everett Green and the Profession of History.” The Journal of British Studies. 42 (January 2003): 65-90.
• “Victorian Narrative Jurisprudence." Law and Literature: Current Legal Issues. Ed. Michael Freeman and Andrew D. E. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, vol. 2:437-461.

Honors and Awards

• Awarded the competitive year-long sabbatical fellowship for Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 semesters.
• Elected chair, University Academic Senate (2010-2011).
• Star Teaching Award, National Residence Hall Honorary Society (2003)
• Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education Grant for “Who Counts? Math Across the Curriculum for Global Mission,” U.S. Department of Education, $600,000 (2007-10)
• Forward Thinking Research Grant, with Colleen Willenbring and Kaye Wierzbicki, for “Collaboration and Mentoring: Undergraduate, Graduate and Professional Research in Literature and Law,” Marquette University Graduate School, $1,000 (2006)
• Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility, co-authored proposal with Margaret Bloom, Association of American Colleges and Universities, $3,000 (2005-09)
• Way-Klingler Interdisciplinary Teaching Award, with Prof. Shirley Wiegand, for “Literature and Law in the Law School and Undergraduate Curriculum” $20,000 (2005)
• Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society, $5000 (2005)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Huntington Library, $40,000 (1999-2000)