Directory

Biography

Prof. Steven Amarnick joined the Kingsborough English Department in the fall of 2000. He teaches freshman composition, developmental, and literature courses. 

For many years Prof. Amarnick has been co-coordinator of the campus Safe Zone program, which he founded along with a colleague. Safe Zone gives support and visibility to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, faculty, and staff. As of Fall 2012, close to 150 current Kingsborough employees have become “Allies” who are specially trained in three-hour workshops. In addition to the Ally training, Safe Zone sponsors and co-sponsors other workshops, lectures, performances, films, panels, and holiday parties.

For College Now, Prof. Amarnick developed a course, “The Comic Spirit in Literature and Culture,” which he taught to high school students at Lincoln and Dewey, and for a number of years he worked with high school and college teachers as seminar leader for Looking Both Ways, sponsored by CUNY’s Office of Academic Affairs. Prof. Amarnick has been closely involved, from its earliest days, with Kingsborough’s Opening Doors Learning Communities, which focuses heavily on easing the transition to college for new students.  And for thirteen summers, from 1998-2010, he taught The Odyssey and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Prep for Prep, a leadership-development program for sixth graders from minority backgrounds.

Prof. Amarnick has written widely on the work of British novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) and curated an exhibit, “Anthony Trollope: The Art of Modesty,” at NYU’s Fales Library. Soon after coming to Kingsborough, he received a PSC-CUNY grant to study The Duke’s Children, the final novel in Trollope’s famed Palliser series. Though his intention at the time was merely to write an article about the heavily edited, thousand-page manuscript, Prof. Amarnick came to see that the cuts Trollope was forced to make by his publisher severely damaged the novel, and that it was possible to figure out what Trollope’s intentions were.With the help of two assistants, Prof. Amarnick has done the painstaking, and immensely satisfying, work of reconstruction, adding two hundred pages of “new” material to the book. The Duke’s Children: First Complete Edition, was published in spring 2015 by the Folio Society--in time for Trollope's bicentenary.

Prof. Amarnick received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and his Master’s and Ph.D. from Rutgers University.

Education

Ph.D., Rutgers University
MA, Rutgers University
BA, Brown University