Kenneth Speirs English Office: P118 Phone: 562-938-4880 E-mail: kspeirs@lbcc.edu 2008 Curriculum Vitae Fall 2009 Classes English 801A - MW 9:30-11:30 English 801A - MW 11:30-1:30 English 801B - TuTh 10-12 English 41 - MW 1:30-2:45 Fall 2009 Office Hours Mondays and Wednesdays 8:30-9 Tuesdays and Thursdays 8:30-10

Kenneth Speirs joined the English department at Long Beach City College in the fall of 2005.

He earned his Ph.D. from New York University in 1998. While completing his graduate work at NYU, Professor Speirs served for six years as an instructor and Teaching Mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. After completing his dissertation, he moved to Asia, where he lived and taught for three years at universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei. He returned to New York City in the fall of 2001, where he worked as an assistant professor of English at the City University of New York, Kingsborough Community College campus.

Professor Speirs is a nineteenth century Americanist with expertise in the uses of life writing. His dissertation, entitled ’The Deadly Space Between’: Union and Mediation in the Narrative Imagination of Herman Melville, asserts the importance of both historical and biographical contexts in understanding Melville’s preoccupation with the problem of human communion. A Mellon fellowship at the Humanities Center, CUNY from 2002-03 allowed him to work on his new book project about autobiography in the American West. Entitled Staking a Claim: Writing the American West, 1840-1940, this study uses the life writing of a black cowboy, a group of Chinese immigrants, a Latino “bandit,” and the first woman to climb Pike’s Peak, among others, in order to investigate the ways the West has always been a place of competing “stories,” a “place” with various meanings, brought into being through life writing. The first chapter of this manuscript, entitled “Writing Self (Effacingly): E-race-d Presences in The Life and Adventures of Nat Love,” appears in Western American Literature (Fall 2005). His recent book, entitled Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects, co-edited with SanSan Kwan and published by the University of Texas Press, gathers a number of essays that give various perspectives on the topic of mixed race.

Awarded a Fulbright Lecturer grant in China for spring 2009, Professor Speirs has also received fellowships from the National Humanities Center at Yale University (summer 2003) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (summer 2007 and 2008).