David Urban, Assistant Professor, English
616-526-8646
dvu2@calvin.edu
Office: LN 163 (directions)
Weekly Schedule
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Educational/Professional Background
Professor Urban graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern University in 1990 with a BA in English. After teaching in universities in China for two years, he returned to the U.S. and received his M.A. in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1994), his M.Div. at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School of Trinity International University (1998), and his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2001). While in Chicago he taught at several universities, including the University of Illinois at Chicago, North Park University, Roosevelt University, and Loyola University. Upon completing his Ph.D., he taught at Oklahoma Baptist University from 2001 until 2003, when he joined Calvin College’s English department.
Academic Interests/Areas of Specialization
Renaissance and seventeenth-century British literature (especially Milton and Shakespeare), American literature through the Civil War, Modern Drama, Bible as literature.
Selected Activities
Professor Urban has published articles and reviews on subjects including Milton, Donne, Hawthorne, Melville, Bible as literature, and pedagogy for journals such as Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies, Christianity and Literature, Religion and Literature, Cithara, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and in several book chapters. He has co-edited a forthcoming collection of essays on vision and violence in Milton, he recently completed an annotated bibliography on Milton scholarship, and he is completing a book-length study on Milton’s use of and identification with several figures in Matthew’s parables. He is the faculty sponsor of Prison Fellowship at Calvin.
Favorite Books
Paradise Lost by John Milton, King Lear and The Tempest by William Shakespeare, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorainne Hansberry, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West, Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, Jonathan Edwards’ sermons, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Hobbies
Running, spending time with his wife, Adrienne, and their sons Daniel and Gabriel, listening to Bob Dylan and jazz. His favorite movie directors are Woody Allen and Orson Wells. Recently the Urban family has become strangely enamored with following the Grand Rapids Griffins, the local AHL hockey team.
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