Ann C. Colley
Ann C. Colley
Distinguished Professor
(716) 878-5408
Campus Address: Ketchum Hall 312
colleyac@buffalostate.edu
Ann C. Colley spent the first thirteen years of her life in England (in Lancashire and London). She then came with her parents to live in the United States. She spent part of a year in Boston; a year in Newport, Rhode Island, and eventually moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where she attended Lane High School and then won a music scholarship that allowed her to become a student at the College of William & Mary.
Upon graduation she was uncertain about what to do next. At the last minute she decided to enter the graduate English program at the University of Virginia. The experiences there settled her future; since then she has never left academia. Professor Colley eventually received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her first teaching experience (other than part-time teaching at the Chicago Circle Campus) was at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
After twelve years on the English faculty, she moved to Buffalo and has been teaching at Buffalo State College since 1985. Professor Colley's main interest is in Victorian literature. Most of her critical writing is on cultural history, the relationship between words and images, and on the character of nostalgia and recollection. Most recently she has done extensive work on Robert Louis Stevenson.
In late 2003, her most recent critical work, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, was published by Ashgate Publishing Limited. She has also published books with the University of Georgia Press, Macmillan Press, St. Martin's Press, and with Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Because of her recent experiences as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in both Poland and Ukraine, Professor Colley also has an interest in the history of American literature and a special interest in the history of African-American literature, a subject she has taught at both the University of Warsaw and Schevchenko University in Kiev.
In November 2009, the State University of New York Board of Trustees approved the appointment of Ann C. Colley, professor of English, to the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor.