Rebecca Dyer received her PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002 and started her career at Rose-Hulman that same year. She regularly teaches Technical and Professional Communications (a junior-level requirement) and film and literature courses, such as From Text to Screen: Film Adaptations, British Fiction and Film, and Narratives of Travel, Migration, and Displacement. She has also taught at universities abroad while on leave from Rose-Hulman. At the Université d’Orléans in France in 2015-16, she taught a variety of courses to English majors (undergrad and grad level). As a Fulbright Scholar to Lebanon in 2007-08, she conducted research on Lebanese fiction and film while teaching a cultural studies class at Lebanese American University in Beirut.
In her research, Dr. Dyer focuses on British, transnational, and anticolonial authors’ and filmmakers’ depictions of class and power relations. She has published journal articles and book chapters analyzing works by Graham Greene, Sam Selvon, Harold Pinter, Joseph Losey, Mahmoud Darwish, Jean-Luc Godard, Hanif Kureishi, Stephen Frears, Zadie Smith, Rashid al-Daif, Hoda Barakat, Danielle Arbid, among others. She has an article forthcoming on Losey’s The Servant, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, and Steven Zaillian’s Ripley series.
Academic Degrees
- PhD, University of Texas at Austin, English, 2002
- MA, University of Tulsa, English, 1995
- BS, Oklahoma State University, Journalism, 1989
Awards & Honors
- Fulbright Traditional Scholars Award (teaching and conducting research) Lebanon, 2007-08
- Scholar of the Year Award, Humanities and Social Sciences Department, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2007
Research Experiences
- Representations of servants and workers in contemporary literature and film
- Depictions of cities, memorials, and public spaces in transnational literature
- Migration narratives
Select Publications & Presentations
“Masters and Servants, Class, and the Colonies in Graham Greene’s 1940s Fiction,” in The 1940s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 191-221.
“Class and Anticolonialism in Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey’s The Servant." Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 38, no. 4, 2015, pp. 147-67.
“Mahmoud Darwish in Film: Politics, Representation, and Translation in Jean-Luc Godard’s Ici et Ailleurs and Notre Musique.” co-authored with François Mulot, Cultural Politics, vol. 10, no. 1, 2014, pp. 70-91.
“Representations of the Migrant Domestic Worker in Hoda Barakat’s The Tiller of Waters and Danielle Arbid’s In the Battlefields.” Embargoed Literature: Arabic, special issue of College Literature, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 11-37.
“Poetry of Politics and Mourning: Mahmoud Darwish’s Genre-Transforming Tribute to Edward W. Said." Remapping Genre, special issue of PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1447-62.
“Generations of Black Londoners: Echoes of Caribbean Migrants’ Voices in Victor Headley’s Yardie and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Black British Literature, special issue of Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, vol. 5, no. 2, 2004-05, pp. 81-102.
“Immigration, Postwar London, and the Politics of Everyday Life in Sam Selvon’s Fiction." Everyday Life, special issue of Cultural Critique, vol. 52, 2002, pp.108-44.
Teaching Interests
- Transnational and postcolonial literature and film
- 20th and 21st Century British literature
- Arabic literature in translation
- Academic writing, and textual analysis