Chair, Professor
English Department, St. John's Liberal Arts and Sciences
St. John Hall, Room B15
Queens campus
(718) 990-6387
sicaris@stjohns.edu
Educational Background
Ph.D., 1986, Cornell University, English Literature and
Languages
M.A., 1983, Cornell University, English Literature and
Languages
B.A., 1979, Manhattan College, summa cum laude
Profile
Stephen Sicari received his PhD from Cornell University in 1986 and
came to St John's after ten years at Adelphi University in Long
Island. He has been Chair of the English Department since
1997. His research has focused on the ways certain canonical
modernist texts look to ancient and medieval models for
inspiration. His first book, Pound's Epic Ambition (SUNY
Press, 1991), examined how Pound's Cantos reenacted the epic
trajectories of Homer, Virgil, and especially Dante. In
Joyce's Modernist Allegory (U of South Carolina Press, 2001), he
demonstrated how Joyce used the Biblical and Dantesque versions of
allegory in writing Ulysses. He is currently finishing a
project to be called A Modernist Humanism in which he seeks to
describe how several modernist writers – Pound and Joyce again, but
this time also Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Wallace Stevens – seek to
retrieve and renew earlier versions of humanism in their large and
ambitious literary projects.