Dr. Joseph Musser

Contact Information

Office: Sturges 212
Phone: 740-368-3578
E-mail: jfmusser@owu.edu
Web Site: http://go.owu.edu/~jfmusser/

Specialty

18^th Century British literature; nonfiction writing

Education

M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia
B.A. Union College (NY)

Biography

Professor Musser served as Benjamin T. Spencer Professor of Literature from 1988 to 1992. He is a past winner of Ohio Wesleyan’s Shankland Award for outstanding teaching, and has been a Newberry Library Fellow. An eighteenth-century specialist, he has published essays on Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, William Cowper, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the paradigm for nerve research in late eighteenth-century medicine.

Courses Taught

ENG 105, Freshman Writing Seminar
ENG 150, Introduction to Literary Study
ENG 176, Comedy and Satire
ENG 228, British images
ENG 260, Writing Essays
ENG 265, Elements of Style and Rhetoric
ENG 316, Writing Poetry
ENG 346, The British Restoration and Eighteenth Century
ENG 415, Rhetoric of the novel
ENG 482, Nonfiction Writing Workshop

Major Publications

“Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue,’ ” The South Atlantic Quarterly 83:2 (spring 1984) 176-92.

“The Perils of Relying on Thomas Kuhn,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18:2 (winter 1984-85), 215-226.

“William Cowper” (biographical/critical entry in The Literary Encyclopedia, http://www.litencyc.com/) (2003).

“An Experiment in Information Literacy: Using ERes to Extend and Enhance Classroom and Library Instruction” by Danielle Clarke and Joseph Musser (March 2004). Presented at Ohio Commons for Digital Education 2004, March 7-9, “The Convergence of Libraries, Learning and Technology Conference” Ohio Learning Network, OhioLINK, The Ohio Supercomputer Center.

“Paradigmatic, Narrative, and Genetic Histories of Science,” in Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment, ed. Donald C. Mell and Theodore E. H. Braun. Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988.

“The On-Campus Interview,” Profession, fall 1995.

Musical Composition: “Inauguration Processional” and “Processional: Celebration” (2008), written for the inauguration of Rock Jones as 16th president of Ohio Wesleyan University; scored for brass quintet, timpani, and organ.

Musical Composition: “March for Flute, Bassoon, and Piano” (2006).

Musical Composition: “Organ Partita on Engelberg, ‘When In Our Music God is Glorified’” (2005).

Musical Composition: “Psalm 23” (2004), a setting of the Psalm scored for SATB, flute, cello, and organ.

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