Amy Friedman

Amy Friedman

  • College of Liberal Arts

    English

    Professor - Instructional

    Programs
    • First Year Writing Program
    • Liberal Studies

    Affiliated Faculty

    Programs
    • Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
Office Location

Mazur Hall, 927

Expertise

First Year Writing, Satire, Postcolonial Satire, Genre Theory, Beat Generation, Women Writers of the Beat Generation

Biography

Dr. Friedman heard the siren call of satire early in her academic career, and has devoted herself to its study ever since. Her undergraduate college applications, filed in a distant era when a request for one’s reading list of the past year was a common element, featured an enthusiastic catalogue of the complete works of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, S.J. Perelman, and 65 novels by P.G. Wodehouse. Critic Ihab Hassan may have decreed that literary fiction “now makes [language] the center of its reflexive concern, and explodes in ludic, parodic, ironic forms” but he could just as well have been referring to Dr. Friedman’s own bookshelves. She received a Thomas J. Watson research fellowship upon completion of her B.A. at Bryn Mawr to research suffrage-related theater and contemporary women’s political theater in the UK, Italy, and Morocco. She spent 18 months and her entire award on theater tickets and festivals, and taking playwrights and directors for drinks in pubs. When the fellowship ended she neglected to return home, and spent the next 12 years in London, writing radio satire, working in theater, and teaching literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Now resident in Philadelphia, Dr. Friedman continues to publish and present her work on satire, genre theory, postcolonial writing, and the Beat Generation, at both local and international conferences.

Selected Publications

  • Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fictions and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Press 2019.
  • “When the Beat in Beat Generation is the Beat in Offbeat Comedy” in Approaches to Teaching the Beat Generation, ed. Nancy Grace, Modern Language Association, 2019.
  • “Rochelle Owens: Off-Beat, Off-Off-Broadway,” in Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl” Generation. Ed. Deborah Geis, Methuen Press, 2016, 57-68.
  • “Interview: Rochelle Owens, Playwright,” Journal of Beat Studies 4, 2016, 257-73.

Courses Taught

  • English 0701: Introduction to Academic Writing
  • English 0802: Analytical Reading and Writing
  • Honors Seminar: The Beat Generation
  • Honors Seminar: Satire – The Deadliest Genre
  • Shakespeare at the Movies
  • Women in Literature
  • British Literature Survey I
  • British Literature Survey II
  • American Literature Survey II
  • Senior Capstone- Restoration and 18th-C Literature
  • ​Detective Fiction
  • Introduction to Interdisciplinary Research – MA in Lib. Arts