Page Delano
Associate Professor
EMAIL: pdelano@bmcc.cuny.edu
Office: N-751N
Office Hours:
Phone: +1 (212) 220-8000;ext=5193
Associate Professor Page Delano has been teaching at BMCC since 2004. Before that time, she was an academic advisor in the Honors College at Hunter College, CUNY, and taught widely throughout CUNY, as well as at Barnard College. Her collection of poems, No One with a Past Is Safe, was published by Word Press in 2002. Her academic writing focuses on women and war, with an emphasis on American women during World War II. “I am concerned with women’s citizenship, especially since women, like people of color, did not have full citizenship until the 1960s,” says Professor Delano. She lives in Brooklyn. Her scholarly publications, and a short list of poems published are noted in the publications section, below.
Expertise
World War II American Society , War, Genocide, Gender
Degrees
- B.A. history, University of Maryland Eastern Shore,1981
- Johns Hopkins University, The Writing Seminars (creative writing — poetry),1983
- Ph.D. English (American studies/ cultural studies), The Graduate Center, City University of New York,1996
Courses Taught
- English Composition is the standard freshman writing course. The course introduces students to academic writing. By its conclusion, students will be ready for English 201 and for the writing they will be asked to do in advanced courses across the curriculum. Students completing ENG 101 will have mastered the fundamentals of college-level reading and writing, including developing a thesis-driven response to the writing of others and following the basic conventions of citation and documentation. They will have practiced what Mike Rose calls the "habits of mind" necessary for success in college and in the larger world: summarizing, classifying, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing. Students will be introduced to basic research methods and MLA documentation and complete a research project. Students are required to take a departmental final exam that requires the composition of a 500 word, thesis-driven essay in conversation with two designated texts.
Prerequisite: Pass the CAT-R and CAT-W or Accuplacer tests
Course Syllabus - 6 CRS.7 HRS.NULL LAB HRS.ENG 121 (English Composition & Introduction to Literature in Tandem)
- This course combines English 101 and 201 into a one-semester course. It is designed for students with a high level of reading and writing proficiency. Departmental permission is required.
Prerequisite: Pass the CATW and CATR tests
Course Syllabus - This is a course that builds upon skills introduced in English 101. In this course, literature is the field for the development of critical reading, critical thinking, independent research, and writing skills. Students are introduced to literary criticisms and acquire basic knowledge necessary for the analysis of texts (including literary terms and some literary theory); they gain proficiency in library and internet research; and they hone their skills as readers and writers. Assignments move from close readings of literary texts in a variety of genres to analyses that introduce literary terms and broader contexts, culminating in an independent, documented, thesis-driven research paper. By the conclusion of English 201, students will be prepared for the analytical and research-based writing required in upper-level courses across the curriculum; they will also be prepared for advanced courses in literature.
Prerequisite: ENG 101
Course Syllabus - This course will focus on a specific theme, concept, cultural milieu, or major author to be announced in advance. Topics for the following semester will be made available by the English Department during registration. Each section of the course will cover in-depth a single special topic, such as one of the following: the Harlem Renaissance, Literature and the Environment, Utopian and Dystopian Literature, Literature and Medicine, The Beat Generation, Literature of the Working Class, Satire in the 18th Century, Censorship and Literature, Literature of Immigration, War in Literature, Madness and Inspiration in Literature, Gay and Lesbian Literature, and Women in Shakespeare. Prerequisites: ENG 101 and 201, or ENG 121
Course Syllabus - This course focuses on the contributions of women literary artists from a variety of cultures and ethnic groups. It examines how some writers have both reflected the prevailing female stereotypes of their age and background, and also imagined the "New Woman." Enrollment is open to both women and men.
Course Syllabus - This course focuses on the literature of urban America since 1950 and in particular on how contemporary writers use the images and themes of the city.
Course Syllabus - This course presents a global approach to literature by introducing prose, poetry and drama representative of different cultures and historical periods, from the 17th century to the present. Students engage in close readings of individual texts and contextual/comparative analyses. Written and spoken activities are designed to enhance students? appreciation of literature and their awareness of the ways it arises from, shapes, and reflects the world?s cultures.
Course Syllabus
Research and Projects
- “Border Crossing: Women’s Flights Across the Spanish Border, 1939-1945” — for the PSC-CUNY Grant awarded April 2008
PSC CUNY grant proposal, Fall 2007 (cycle 39)
This is the beginning of the description of my project for this grant:
Border Crossing: Women’s Flights Across the Spanish Border, 1939-1945
“I found a place where it is easy to cross”
–postcard written by an American, found in a flea market, Plaza Major, Madrid, January 2003
This is an essay in its early stages that emerges from my broader work about women and World War II. I will focus on American women crossing the French-Spanish border at the close of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II. This interest grows out of a conference paper for a panel on “women on the road,” “Traveling Women in France” (at the Popular Culture Association last spring). The essay perhaps has its roots as well in the postcard I encountered in Madrid’s busy flea market at the Place Major not far from elegant, bourgeois gift shops which sold small dolls of Franco, along with those of Mussolini and Hitler. That this anonymous voice of most likely a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (I didn’t buy the card) should be floating in the same community as this reactionary nostalgia and historical confusion has troubled me for a long time. Then, this past July, I briefly crossed the border from France into Spain, seeking the grave of Walter Benjamin and the monument that commemorates him. A German “stateless” Jew in exile in Paris, and cultural critic associated with the Frankfurt School, Benjamin had made the difficult trek across the Pyrenees in September 1940. Upon discovering that he would be forced to return to France, he took his life, and was buried in a nameless grave in Portbou. Returning to France on a majestic narrow road above the ragged Mediterranean coast, I came upon workers refurbishing a monument in homage to the “100,000 men, women, and children, Spanish Republicans and Internationalists” who crossed from Spain in the Portbou-Cerbère region in February 1939….
- Red Heads
I am working on a collaborative memoir with two other women, about our years as radical organizers in the 1970s/1980s. I lived in southern West Virginia, where my husband was a coal miner, active in the wildcat strikes of the 1970s.
Publications
- “One Million Bras” and “Baltic Street in Blue.” Affilia, Journal of Women and Social Work , Vol. 1 No. 3, Fall 2006. Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage , 344-5.
- “Men Carry,” “Poem after Buying Bread”, Hanging Loose
- “Lucie Aubrac,” “Literature of World War II,U.S.” and “WW II Posters, Portrayal of Women.” Women and War Encyclopedia, ed. Bernard Cook, Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO,
- “After Cavell: “Continual Ban, Continual Divorce in American Films, 1939-1961” for After Intimacy: The Culture of Divorce in the West since 1789, eds. Karl Leydecker and Nicholas White, Introduction by Stanley Cavell, , European Connections Volume 10, Bern, Switzerland and New York: Peter Lang Publishers. 2007
- “Self-Rescuer.” Saint Ann’s Review, Vol. 6 No.1, Winter 2006, Brooklyn, NY. 88-90.,
- “Loving Occupiers: Kay Boyle’s Critique of Power in Occupied Germany in The Smoking Mountain.” Kay Boyle for the Twenty-First Century: New Essays, ed. Thomas Austenfeld, Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag
- No One with a Past Is Safe (poetry collection), Word Press
- “Making Up for War: Sexuality and Citizenship in Wartime Culture,” Feminist Studies , 2000 26(1): 33-68.
- “Friendship Intensified by War: Kay Boyle and Mary Reynolds” , E-rea Revue électronique dâétudes sur le monde anglophone
Honors, Awards and Affiliations
PSC-CUNY Grant 2008-2009 Support for research/writing project: American Women Crossing the Spanish Border, 1936-1945BMCC Faculty Development Grant 2007-2008“Gal or Pal: The Girl Problem, Citizenship, and Posters of World War II” –a study of concerns about loose lips, loose women and venereal disease.Participant, NYU Faculty Resource Network, June 2006.Seminar on “New York City and the Cosmopolitan Ideal” PSC-CUNY Grant, 2005-6.“Loose Lips Sink Ships: Sexuality and Citizenship”Semifinalist, Walt Whitman Prize, Academy of American Poets, 2000for poetry manuscripts No One with a Past Is Safe, and Body of Water, Fellow, Mellon Seminar, CUNY Graduate Center, Summer 2000.“The 1950s,” with Morris DicksteinSalzburg Fellow, Salzburg Seminar, 2006Salzburg, Austria, July 26 – August 2, 2006Residency Fellowship, Yaddo, summer 1996.Residency Fellowships, Blue Mountain Center, 1995, 1990. Chancellor’s FellowshipA fellowship for academic year 2014/2015 to work on my project about American women in Europe during the Long World War II
Additional Information
Professor Delano has taught new Special Topics courses at BMCC including Literature of the Vietnam War and Literature of Genocide.
