Todd Barosky, Ph.D.

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Associate Professor, English

Director of the Core Curriculum

"To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more, there could be things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge. It is to permit yourself an extraordinary freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you may be right. This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe." - Barry Lopez

Education

Ph.D., The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
B.A., The College of the Holy Cross

Background

Todd Barosky is an associate professor of English and the director of the Core curriculum at Saint Martin’s University. He studied English as an undergraduate at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and at Mansfield College, Oxford University. In 2010 he received his Ph.D. in English with an American Studies certificate from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Before coming to Saint Martin’s, he taught at Fordham University and Hunter College in New York City.

Dr. Barosky is a scholar and teacher of American literature. During his ten years at Saint Martin’s, he has taught courses on American poetics, American journey narratives, African-American literature, and the urban novel. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest, he has developed an interest in Western American literature and has taught courses that examine gender, sexuality, and racial identity in the work of western women writers such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala-Ša, and Willa Cather. In 2017 he taught a course on contemporary Vietnamese-American literature that included a study abroad trip with students to Vietnam.

Dr. Barosky also teaches a wide range of Core courses on such subjects as the sonnet, Gulliver’s Travels, George Perec, the global novel, and The Overstory. His most recent Core course responded to the coronavirus pandemic by studying the history of plague literature from Book of Exodus to Colson Whitehead’s 2011 postapocalyptic zombie novel Zone One.

Todd lives with his wife, Katie, and two sons, Jack and William, in Tacoma, Washington. He enjoys traveling, gardening, watching baseball, running, and spending time in the nearby forests and mountains.

Select publications:

  • “Review of Dustin P. Zuber, A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination.” Religion and the Arts. Vol 27, no. 1-2 (2023): 268-271.
  • “Social Justice and Nineteenth-Century Realism: William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes.” In Social Justice and American Literature. Eds Robert Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein. Ipswich: Salem Press, 2017.
  • “Introduction to WJS Special Issue: ‘Further Directions in William James and Literary Studies.’” William James Studies, co-edited with Justin-Rogers Cooper. Vol 13, no. 2 (Fall 2017): i-vii.
  • “Introduction to WJS Special Issue: ‘New Directions in William James Studies.’” William James Studies, co-edited with Justin Rogers-Cooper. Vol 13, no.1 (Spring 2017): i-iv.
  • “The Novelist and the Mystic: Swedenborgian Horizons in the Realism of William Dean Howells.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. Vol 46, no. 4 (2016): 535-567.
  • “Legal and Illegal Moneymakers: Colonial American Counterfeiters and the Novelization of Eighteenth-Century Crime Literature.” Early American Literature. Vol 47, no. 3 (2012): 531-560.