Pearl James

Education:
Ph.D., Yale University, 2002
B.A., University of California Berkeley, 1994
Biography:

I am the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Lewis Honors College and an Associate Professor in the UK English department. My work focuses on representations of war in literature, popular writing, cinema, visual art, and propaganda.  I am the Book Reviews Editor for an interdisciplinary journal, Home Front Studies.

I teach courses in film and literature at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I received the Provost's Award for Outstanding Teaching (2014), the Alumni Association's Great Teacher Award (2015) and, when I was the Faculty Sponsor for Sigma Tau Delta (Honors Society in English), the Student Organization Advisor of the Year Award (2016). 

I co-teach a summer course on Sustainability and Biodiversity, and in 2026 will take students to mainland Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.  For more info, search the Education Abroad Programs for "Ecuador." 

Research Interests:
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Literature and Culture
Film
War & Propaganda
Availability

Office hours Fall 2025: Wednesdays, 3-4:30.  Please send an email to let me know you're coming. 

Research

Areas of Specialty:

  • 20th Century American Literature & Culture
  • World War I
  • Film
  • American Modernism
  • Visual Culture/Propaganda Posters
  • Masculinity Studies
Selected Publications:
  • The New Death: American Modernism and World War I, University of Virginia, 2013.
  • Picture This!  World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. Pearl James, University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
  • “Citizen-Consumers in the American Iconosphere During World War I,” in World War I and American Art, ed. Robert Cozzolino, David Lubin, and Anne Classen Knutson, Princeton University Press and the Philadelphia Academy of Art, 2016.
  • “Propaganda,” in The Cambridge History of American Great War Literature and Culture, ed. Timothy Dayton and Mark Van Wienan, 2020.
  • “World War I Regenders America,” in Teaching Representations of the First World War, ed. Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee, MLA, 2017.
  • "A Catholic Boyhood: The Newman School, The Newman News, and Monsignor Fay” in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context, edited Bryant Mangum, Cambridge University Press, 2013
  • "The Great Gatsby and the Context of World War I," in Approaches to Teaching The Great Gatsby, ed. Jackson Bryer and Nancy VanArsdale, MLA, 2009.
  • "The Failure to Mourn in Faulkner’s Sartoris," in Modernism and Mourning, ed. Patricia Rae, Bucknell University Press, 2007.
  • "'The Enid Problem': Dangerous Modernity in One of Ours," in Cather Studies, vol. 6: History, Memory, and War, ed. by Steven Trout, Univ. Nebraska Press, 2006.
  • "History and Masculinity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise." Modern Fiction Studies 51.1 (2005): 1-33.

Work in Progress: The Authenticity Effect in Hollywood War Films (monograph)