Grad Organizations • Grad News • Conferences • Student Directory • English Department
Sean
de Vega
Program: English Ph.D.
Began program in 2004
Area of Study: 19th Century British Literature and Culture
E-Mail: sean-de-vega@uiowa.edu
After four years in the US Navy (1995-1999) as a linguist, I completed a B.A. in Classics at Rice University, during which time I studied the pastoral tradition in Hellenistic poetry. During the summer of 2003, I came to Iowa as a research fellow in the SROP program and worked with Florence Boos on the long narrative poems of William Morris and aided in the ongoing process of collating texts for a new critical edition of his poem The Life and Death of Jason (1867). I then returned to Rice, where I took a B.A. in English (2004) after taking literature courses ranging from third world literature to American modernism to Tennyson, Browning and Hopkins. As a doctoral student I have become particularly interested in Morris's place within the development of Marxist (and later Leninist) political theory and praxis. I have begun to extend this interest in Morris's political thought into a broader field of inquiry, in which I hope to learn more about the influence that 19th century communists, socialists and social democratic progressives exerted upon revolutionary figures of the twentieth century, such as C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Leon Trotsky, Raya Dunayevskaya, Louis Althusser, E. P. Thompson, and Fidel Castro.