Mark Morrisson

Professional Bio

Mark S. Morrisson is Professor and Head of English at Penn State. He is author of The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905-1920 (U of Wisconsin P, 2001); Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (Oxford UP, 2007), and Modernism, Science, and Technology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), and of a monograph tentatively titled Light on the Path: Genre Fiction and the Mainstreaming of Occultism, 1880-1940 (under contract with Oxford University Press); and numerous articles and chapters; and he is co-editor, with Richard Shillitoe, of I Saw Water: An Occult Novel and Other Selected Writings by Ithell Colquhoun (Penn State UP, 2014), and, with Jack Selzer, co-editor of an edition of the Parisian little magazine Tambour. Morrisson is a past editor of the Penn State University Press series, Refiguring Modernism: Arts, Literatures, Sciences, and a past co-editor, with Sean Latham, of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. Early in his career, he enjoyed a role in the founding of the Modernist Studies Association, and he returned at mid-career to its board as President.

Morrisson's research and teaching ranges across several areas including British, Irish, and American modern and contemporary literature, periodical studies, literature and science, the sciences of the modernist period, and twentieth-century Western Esotericism. In recent years, he has explored the writing and art of British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun.

Winner of the College of the Liberal Arts Service to the College Award, the Class of 1933 Distinction in the Humanities Award in the College of the Liberal Arts, and of the Milton S. Eisenhower Award for Distinguished Teaching at Penn State, Morrisson especially enjoys the challenges of interdisciplinary pedagogy, and regularly team-teaches a course with a chemistry instructor at Penn State. In addition to his work on the Penn State campus, Morrisson enjoys traveling for the university---teaching a study abroad program in Ireland and working to enhance the English department's partnerships in East Asia. Morrisson recently served on the ADE Executive Committee and is an MLA certified program reviewer.