Elisa Beshero-Bondar

Welcome to my site! These pages are devoted to the many sides of my life and work as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where I teach literature courses in a range of genres, time periods, and varieties, mainly nineteenth-century British and American. I'm also the Faculty Advisor for the Alpha Alpha Delta Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society.

Here is my curriculum vitae.

I'm currently exploring research methods in Digital Humanities, including coding in XML, to study and compare literary texts and to design digital archives. With help from a team of University of Pittsburgh students and faculty, I look forward to designing a digital archive of English poetry drawing up Pacific voyage literature. I also hope launch a collaborative scholarly edition of the writings of Mary Russell Mitford.

I still think of myself as a student. After years of wandering through wild literary landscapes, labyrinths of critical theory, and  formidable tomes of epic poetry, I found myself, to my surprise, finishing a doctoral thesis and earning a PhD in English Literature from Penn State University, specializing in British Romantic poetry in 2003. In general, I love the fantastical in literature, and for me studying Romanticism is all about finding ways for the imagination to renovate the world and to remove us from our comfort zones. The literature I love best shocks us into realizing how much we humans construct our own realities, so we can escape them when they threaten to imprison us and build new worlds with understanding of our own dangerous powers. Such world-building Romanticism is perhaps best represented in the art and poetry of one of my favorites, William Blake.

My book, Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011. Among the poets I discussed in that book, I'm continuing research of Robert Southey, Mary Russell Mitford, and Margaret Compton.

Gallery of "Pre-Raphaelite" Art Based on British Literary Subjects

Fantasy Writers Web Archive (featuring creative and research projects of students in my Spring 2006 Fantasy Writers course, which studied the epic fantasy cycles of J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin)

Introductory Guide to Web Design at Pitt-Greensburg

Favorite bean: Garbanzo

Meet my spouse, Greg Bondar, who maintains an archive on
the Soviet N-1 Moon Rocket and a useful set of travel links among other intriguing pages.

Here we are on a spectacular night hike surrounded by flowing lava at Pu'u O'o on the "Big Island" of Hawaii.