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.

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 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.

Spotted in Akaka Falls State Park, near Hilo, Hawaii, where rain and water are constant delight.	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) Elisa's Introductory Guide to Web Design at Pitt-Greensburg Favorite bean: Garbanzo
On Hound Tor, sublime setting of The Hound of the Baskervilles, in the UK's Dartmoor National Park..	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's one of my favorite pictures of us on a spectacular night hike, surrounded by lava flow at Pu'u O'o on the "Big Island" of Hawaii.