Glen Johnson's Headshot

Department

  • English

    • School

  • School of Arts and Sciences

    • Expertise

  • American Literature
  • Emerson and Transcendentalism
  • Narrative Fiction
  • Film of the Classical Hollywood Era

    • Profile

    Glen Johnson is Professor of English and also also has taught in the Media and Communication Studies Department. He has been a member of the Catholic University faculty since 1981, having previously taught at Grinnell College and the University of Louisville. He received undergraduate and doctoral degrees in American Studies, and specializes in American literature and culture, particularly film.

    Dr. Johnson’s scholarship has focused primarily on the works and cultural contexts of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was editor or co-editor of four volumes in Emerson’s Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Topical Notebooks, and Works, and has published articles on Emerson’s manuscripts, compositional techniques, and critical reputation. He has also published articles or made scholarly presentations on fiction writers (Twain, Crane, Faulkner, Warren, Cheever, Melville, Richardson) and canon formation. An edited book on American performance art appeared in 2006.  

    He has taught a wide range of courses in literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels and in media studies. In recent years he developed advanced undergraduate courses exploring pairs of American fiction writers (Hawthorne and Melville, Twain and James, Hemingway and Fitzgerald along with Gertrude Stein). Committed to interdisciplinary studies, he offered pioneering courses on Alfred Hitchcock (taught for over thirty years), Abraham Lincoln in literature and film (developed as part of Catholic University's “Lincoln semester” for the 2009 bicentennial), American humor, and international crime cinema. During his two decades as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, he was a founder of the Media and Communication Studies Department and collaborated on an Honors sequence in Communication Technology and Culture.
     
    Dr. Johnson served for twenty years as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, during which time he was a founder of the Media Studies Department and helped to develop an Honors Program sequence in Communication Technology and Culture. For more than twenty-five years he served as an officer of Catholic University’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter.

     

    Administration

    Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, School of Arts & Sciences, 1991-2012.

    Director, Media Studies Program, 1993-1999, 2001-2002.

    Program Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984-85.

    Acting Chair, Department of English, 1988, 2015-2017