Teacher and critic of British Romantic and 18th-century literature, Irish literature. LGBTQ literature, and film. Writer and documentary filmmaker
Christopher Flynn is an English professor, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He started his professional life as a trombone player, spent a decade writing and editing on daily newspapers in New York, Connecticut, California, and Texas, and has taught and worked on literature and film since 1996. His book, films, and articles tend to explore the outcast, the other, the wanderer in imaginative works. His most recent project, a film about the spaces and places of Romanticism, blurs the lines between artist and critic, documented subject and documentarian. He has taught abroad in France and England, and teaches classes in British and Irish literature, LGBTQ literature, and film.
Associate Professor, 2008-present
Assistant Professor, 2004-present
Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 2002-2004
Ph.D. in English at University of California, Los Angeles, 2002.
M.A. in English at University of California, Los Angeles, 2000.
M.A. in English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, 1997.
B.S. in Music and History at Indiana University, Bloomington, 1987.
Degree student in music performance, The Juilliard School, New York, 1982-83.
2015, 2013, 2010, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, Presidential Excellence Award, St. Edward's University
2003, National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar for College Teachers
2003, William Andrews Clark Library Fellowship
2003, C. Allan and Marjorie Braun Fellowship, The Henry Huntington Library
My research interests include British Romantic literature, Irish literature, and film. Many of these works focus on the figure of the other or outsider. I have published a book and several articles. Recently I have been working on documentary films.
I have published poetry and creative nonfiction. My creative essays have focused on travel. They have appeared in The Montréal Review, Sport Literate, Argestes, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. I studied creative writing at the University of New Orleans, and music at The Juilliard School.
Swimming with Byron: A Documentary Film, New Eyes Films, forthcoming.
Americans in British Literature, 1770-1832: A Breed Apart. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008.
“Super Bowl Sunday on the Seine.” The Montréal Review, March 2013.
“A Bicycle in Paris.” Sport Literate. Fall 2011.
“SE VENDE/FOR SALE: Searching for Signs in Central Mexico.” The Montréal
Review, 2011.
“Les Houches is Very Complicated.” The Montréal Review, July 2011.
“Defoe’s Review: Textual Editing and New Media.” Digital Defoe. Spring 2009. Invited multimedia project. http://www.english.ilstu.edu/digitaldefoe.
“Frances Trollope’s America: From Enlightenment Aesthetics to Victorian Class.” Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment, ed. Miriam Wallace. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.
“Challenging Englishness from the Racial Margins: William Charles Macready’s The Irishman in London; Or, The Happy African.” Irish Studies Review. May 2008, 159-72.
“Dismembering Anglo-America: The Body Politic and the First English Novel about the American Revolution.” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. Fall 2005.
“Body Waxing, Lord Byron and the Long Way Through Turkey.” Identity Theory. February 2005. Reprinted in The Pamphlet of Exciting Thought. October 2005.
“Coleridge’s American Dream: National Genius, Natural Language and the Sonnets of 1794-95.” European Romantic Review. Fall 2002, 411-25.
“This Land Is Our Land: Nationalism, Commerce and Imperial Anxiety in Defoe's Later Works.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. Fall 2000, 11-24.
“ ‘No Other Island in the World’: Mansfield Park, North America and Postimperial Malaise.” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. Fall 2000, 173-86.
Active reading is crucial in all of my classes. You need to read carefully, take notes, mark up your texts, and show up prepared to take an active part in class discussions.
Literature is an artistic record of the way societies have explained themselves to their own members and to others. We figure ourselves out by telling these stories. I am passionate about guiding students through these explorations of our own society and those of other peoples, about helping them see the beauty of the construction of literary texts. We become our best visions of ourselves through a deep study of the liberal arts, and literature is at the core of that study.