Wayne Ripley

Professor Chuck Ripley was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chuuk, Micronesia from 1994 to 1996 and an election supervisor in Bosnia in the spring of 1997. He completed his Masters at the University of Tennessee in 1999, where he wrote his thesis on William Blake’s The Four Zoas. From 2004 to 2006, he was a visiting professor at SUNY Geneseo. 

In 2006, he was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in New York for his dissertation, The Secrets of Dark Contemplation: Edward Young, William Blake, and the History of Radical Devotional Poetics, 1688-1795. This work discusses Blake’s relationship to Young through the lens of religious and poetic enthusiasm in the eighteenth century and is currently being revised for publication. 

Professor Ripley’s other research interests include: 

• religious print culture and Whig politics in the long 18th century
• literacy and orality in discourses of global development
• sustainability
• popular culture and the development of the comic strip and the contemporary graphic novel 

Professor Ripley teaches writing classes on topics such as race and boxing in America and the comic strip and graphic novel. Other classes he teaches include: 

• the Bible as Literature (ENG 224)
• Enlightenments, Revolutions, and Enslavements (ENG 302)
• Classical Mythology (ENG 223)
• the Rise of the Novel (ENG 327)
• Nature and Sustainability (RESC 150), an interdisciplinary summer class with the Biology Department

He is currently a project assistant for the William Blake Archive, and his work has been published in the William Blake Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Romanticism on the Net.