David Farley
Assistant Professor
Institute for Writing Studies
St Augustine Library, Room 160
(718) 990-7911
farleyd@stjohns.edu
Education:
Ph.D., University of Tulsa, 2002 (English Literature)
M.A. University of Tulsa, 1995 (English Literature)
B.A. Adelphi University, 1991 (English Literature)
Profile
David Farley came to St John’s University in 2006 at the launch
of the Institute for Writing Studies. As one of the new First Year
Writing Faculty, Prof Farley has been teaching First Year Writing,
Global Literature, and Honors Writing on both the Staten Island and
Queens campuses. Prior to St John’s, he was a Visiting Professor at
Baruch College – CUNY, where he taught composition and Global
Literature and Professor at ASA Institute in downtown Brooklyn
where he was assistant director of the Writing Center.
Professor Farley approaches composition and First Year Writing
through the lens of travel studies as a way of getting students to
engage with the world as well as to understand the various ways in
which travel experiences are mediated. His book, Modernist
Travel Writing Intellectuals Abroad (University of Missouri
Press, 2010), examines the ways in which certain key modernist
writers – Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca
West -- turned to the travel genre as a way to better assess
the modern world as they simultaneously sought to understand their
own roles in it as writers and observers. Positioned at the
intersection of modernist studies and travel studies this book
focuses on modernism’s politically charged late phase by examining
these authors’ seldom read inter-war travel books. He has also led
a cohort of students abroad to Rome as a part of the University’s
Freshman Passport program.
Professor Farley has also been involved in Academic
Service-Learning here at St John’s, where he launched a project
that linked his Freshman Writing class with The Henry Street
Settlement, a not for profit community based organization on
Manhattan’s lower east side. As part of his ongoing interest in
Service-Learning, he has also attended regional meetings of the New
York Metro Area Partnership (NYMAPS) and Imagining America, as well
as helped to organize, along with other faculty on First Year
Writing, a workshop at the Conference on College Composition and
Communication (CCCC) on the practical implementation of Service
Learning projects.
Professor Farley is currently working on a book whose
theoretical approach is located at the intersection of travel
studies and critical international studies. Travel Writing from
Defoe to Sebald: Towards an Archaeology of Perception seeks to
understand the ways in which travel writing has helped us “see” in
certain historical, cultural, and political contexts.