Curriculum Vitae

Employment History and Education

Publications

Books

Laying Claim: Imagining Empire on the U.S./Mexico Border, under contract, Oxford University Press. 

Why American Literature?, under contract, Wiley-Blackwell, Manifesto Series.

Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois, Duke University Press, 2006. Nominated for American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize and for the Modern Language Association James Russell Lowell Prize.

Voices of the Nation:  Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Cambridge University Press 1998.  (Choice Recommended Book).

Edited and Co-Authored Books

Studying the Americas, co-authored with Alexander Byrd, Anthony Pinn, Michael Emerson, and Moramay López-Alonso, under contract, Palgrave Macmillan.

Hemispheric American Studies: Essays Beyond the Nation, co-edited with Robert S. Levine, Rutgers University Press, 2008.

The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, co-edited with Carol Singley, Rutgers
University Press, 2003.  (Choice Highly Recommended Book).

Articles

“Reinventing American Literary History,” American Literary History 20.3, forthcoming Fall 2008.

“Hemispheric American Studies: Preliminary Thoughts on Research and Pedagogical Challenges,” Literature Compass (Blackwell), forthcoming Fall 2008.

“Childhood Innocence:  Protecting American Childhood,” The Chicago Companion to the Child (University of Chicago Press), forthcoming 2008.

 “Literary Historiography and Biography,” Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 1, Ed. M.A.R. Habib (Cambridge University Press), forthcoming 2008.

 “Confederate Cuba,” American Literature 78.4 December 2006:  Special Issue: Global Contexts/Local Literature: 821-45. Reprint in Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame, Eds. Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman (Duke University Press, 2007): 88-111.

“Literature: Early Republic and the American Renaissance,” “Literature: From the Civil War to World War II,” Encyclopedia of Religion in America, (CQ Press), forthcoming 2008.

“Hemispheric American Literary History—an Introduction,” American Literary History, 18.3, Summer 2006:  397-405.

“Literary Historiography and Biography,” Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 1, Ed. M.A.R. Habib, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2008.

 “Frederick Douglass’ Blood-Stained Gate,” Studies in American Fiction, Vol 34, Fall 2005: 32-40.

“Female Subjects and Subjectivities in Pierre and The Piazza Tales,” A Companion to Melville, Ed. Wyn Kelley, Blackwell Press, 2005: 34-54.

“Constructing Gender,” A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865, Ed. Shirley Samuels, Blackwell Press, 2004: 52-80.

“Consenting Fictions, Fictions of Consent,” American Literary History 16.2, Oxford University Press, Vol. 16.2 (June 2004): 318-329.

“’Letting Her White Progeny Offset Her Dark One’: The Child and the Racial Politics of Nation Making in the Slavery Era,” American Literature, Duke University Press, Vol. 76.2 (June 2004): 221-247.

“Pauline Hopkins and Psychologies of Race,” Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 28 (2003): 203-21.

“’Much Less a Book than a State of Vision’: The Visibility of Race in Henry James,” The Henry James Review, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 23 (2002): 265-72.

"’Informed Eyes’:  The 1890s Child Study Movement and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw," Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender and Culture, Vol. 12.1-2 (Spring 2001): 8-25.

"The Science of Sentiment: The Evolution of the Bourgeois Child in Nineteenth-Century American Narrative," Modern Language Studies, Brown University Press, Vol. 30 (Spring 2000): 27-44.

Introduction, Special Issue: "Sentimentality and the Body in U.S. Cultures," Modern Language Studies, Brown University Press, Vol. 30 (Spring 2000): 5-66.

"'Following the Condition of the Mother': Subversions of Domesticity in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," in Southern Mothers:  Essays on Motherhood in Southern Fiction, Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff King, Eds., Louisiana State University Press (1999): 28-39.

Introduction, Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen, Bantam Classics, (1999).

"Bawdy Talk: The Politics of Women's Public Speech in The Lecturess and The Bostonians,"American Literature, Duke University Press, Vol. 67 (September 1995): 467-484.

Book Series

“Imagining the Americas,” Editor (with Anthony Pinn): Oxford University
Press, 2007--. Books published or under contract include:

Thomas Beebee, Millennial Literatures of the Americas, forthcoming   November 2008. 
Caroline Rody, The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in the   Contemporary Asian American Novel, forthcoming 2009.
Elizabeth Russ, Modern and Postmodern Plantations: Gender, Race and   Nation in New World Imaginaries, forthcoming 2009.
Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism, Liberalism, and   Nineteenth-Century American Literature, under contract.
Jesse Alemán, Wars of Rebellion: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Hispanic   Writings about the American Civil War, under review.
Terrence Johnson, Tragic Soul-Life: WEB Du Bois and the Redemption of   American Democracy, under contract.

Book Reviews

Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, Karen
Sánchez-Eppler; Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern             Fiction, Susan Honeyman; Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the
Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917, Angela Sorby; and Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850-1900, Jennifer Mason, American Literature, Spring 2007.

Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere, Anna Brickhouse, Cambridge University Press, The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History, Fall 2005.

The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere, Elizabeth Dillon, Stanford University Press, Legacy, Fall 2005.

Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Susan M. Griffin, Cambridge University Press, Studies in American Fiction, 2005.

Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation.
Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, Greenwood Press, Sterling Lecater Bland Jr., Journal of Southern History 68.2 (2002): 449-50.

Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the ‘Cornfield Journalist’, Walter Brasch, Mercer Press, Journal of Southern History 68.4 (2002): 987-8.

Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship, Nancy    Ruttenberg, Stanford University Press, American Literature 71.2 (1999): 380-1.

Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845, Johns    Hopkins University Press, Jared Gardner, Canadian Review of American Studies Journal, (Spring 2000).

Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850-90, Karen Tracey, University of Illinois Press, Legacy 17.2 (2000): 235-6.

“The Lady of Little Fishing” and “The Turn of the Screw,” in Companion to the American Short Story, Abby Werlock Ed., New York: Checkmark Books, 1999.

Awards and Grants

Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Leadership Grant Recipient, for Our Americas Archive Partnership, Co Primary Investigator (with Geneva Henry)
Grant Number LG-05-07-0041-0
Funding Agency Award: $979,578.00
Total Award With 50% Match: $1,960,189.00
Start/End Date: November 1, 2007-October 30, 2010

Andrew Mellon Foundation, Andrew Mellon Graduate Pilot Seminar, Co Primary Investigator (with Dean Gary Wihl)
Grant Number 10700671
Funding Agency Award: $201,000.00
Total Award With Rice Cost Share of $135,900.00: $336,900.00
Start/End Date: July 1, 2007-June 30, 2010

National Endowment for the Humanities Grant Recipient and Summer Seminar Leader: “Towards a Hemispheric American Literature,” (with Professor Rachel Adams, Columbia University)
Grant Number: ONE
Funding Agency Award: $118,297.32
Start/End Date: October 1, 2006-September 30, 2007

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library, Pasadena California, June 2, 2008-June 29, 2009.

National Humanities Center Dupont Summer Seminar Leader, “The Globalization of American Literary Studies, NHC, June 15-17 2008.

National Endowment for the Humanities Grant Recipient and Summer Seminar Leader: “Towards a Hemispheric American Literature,” with Professor Rachel Adams, Columbia University, Summer 2007.

Mellon Graduate Seminar: Towards a Hemispheric Americas, Spring 2005-Fall 2005.

Senior Fellow, Rutgers University Center for Childhood Studies Seminar Series and Fellowship Program, 2004-2005.

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Fellowship, The Morgan Library,
New York City, Spring 2002.

Mosle Research Award, Rice University, 2000/1.

Recipient of Rice University Faculty Development Summer Research Stipend, 2000,
 2001, 2002, 2003.

Papers and Invited Talks

“The Idea of American Literature,” Yale University, April 17, 2009.

“Provocations” and “Where is the Archive?,” Chair, Modern Language Association 
Annual Meeting, December 2008.

“These Children of Our America: Childhood and Hemispheric Studies,” American
Studies Association Annual Meeting, October 2008.

“The Landscape of American Literary Studies,” Council on Library and Information
Resources, September 2008.

"The Hemispheric South," University of Mississippi, September 18-19 2008.

“Future Directions for Research in Arts and Humanities,” Enhancing Research
Excellence, Iowa State University, March 28, 2008.

“Afro-American and Latino Literary and Cultural Connections,” Heman Sweatt
Symposium on Civil Rights, The Powerless Majority: Black and Latino
Experience in America,” University of Texas, Austin, March 26, 2008.

“Literary Studies: the Hemisphere, the Nation, and Beyond,” Stephen Haselton
Endowed Lecture, Kean University, New Jersey, November 12, 2007.

“Hemispheric American Studies,” University of Texas, October 30, 2007.

“The Global South,” American Studies Association Annual Conference, October 15,
2007.

“Globalizing American Studies,” Indiana University, April 27, 2007.

“Envisioning a Global Americas,” Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Globalizing the Americas: World Economies and Local Communities,” University of Toronto, December 1, 2006.

"What Are Children For?," Modern Language Association Conference, Chair, December 2006.

"Disciplining the American Child: National Identity, Citizenship and Childhood in Antebellum America," Modern Language Association Conference, Commentator, December 2006.

“Where Does Latin American Studies End and American Studies Begin,” American Studies Association Annual Conference, November 2006.

Invited Lecture and Consultant, “The Future of Childhood Studies,” Rutgers University, Camden. September 29, 2006. New PhD Program in Childhood Studies.

“Hemispheric American Literature,” Chair and Commentator, American Literature Annual Association Meeting, May 2006.

“A Child Blends in His Face the Faces of Both Parents’: Emerson and Transatlantic
Nationalism,” Transatlanticism in American Literature: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe International  Conference, Rothermere Institute for the Americas, Oxford University, July 2006.

“The Americas as Institution and Intellectual Endeavor,” Sawyer Seminar Invited Lecture, University of Toronto, Feb 9, 2006.

“National Identity, Citizenship, and Childhood in Antebellum America,” Chair, Modern
 Language Association Convention, December 2005.

“Global Nations/Foreign Relations in the American Hemisphere,” International American Studies Association Convention, August 2005.

“Whitman in the American Hemisphere,” Second Annual International Walt Whitman
Conference, April 2005.

“The Place of the Child in the Racial State,” University of Maryland, College Park, April 2005.

"Confederate Cuba," Modern Language Association Convention, December 2004.

 “Racialized Geographies: Cuba, the Confederacy, and the United States,” American Studies Association Annual Conference, November 2004.

 “American Fiction Before 1865—Roundtable,” American Literature Association Annual Convention, May 2004.

“The Welfare of Children: Why Have Children Become so Central to Political Debates,”
National Public Radio, Chicago, Odyssey,  March 25, 2004.

“Women Write War,” Del Mar College, Corpus Christi, Texas, April 26, 2004.

“Of Men and Missing Links:  Race and Nation at Century’s End,” American Studies Association Annual Convention, October 2003.

“Just Emerging from Its Cradle: The Race for Nation along the Mexican Border,” Society for the Study of American Women Writers International Conference, September 2003.

“’The Spot and Stain of Racial Difference’:  Race and the Making of the Middle Class in U.S. Sentimental Fiction,” American Literature Association Annual Conference, May 2003.

“’Letting Her White Progeny Offset Her Dark One’: The Child and the Racial Politics of Nation Making in the Slavery Era,” Modern Language Association Convention, December 2002.

“Transnational Twain,” Modern Language Association Convention, December 2002.

“All in the Family: Women’s Abolitionist Politics and the Children’s Periodical,” American Studies Association Annual Convention, November 2002.

Invited Keynote Speaker, International Symposium, "Cultures of Contradiction," Frankfurt University, Germany, May 2001.

“Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories and the Aesthetics of the Gothic,” Modern Language
 Association Convention, December 2001.

“Cradling Liberty: The Child in American Literary Culture,” Modern Language Association Convention, December 2000.

"'Violently Enamoured of Gas and Glass': The Sentimental Child in Cummins's The     Lamplighter," Narrative Conference, April 2000.

"'As Independent as their Nation': The Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy," American Literature Association Annual Conference, May 1999.

"The Science of Sentiment: The Evolution of the Bourgeois Child in Nineteenth-Century Narrative," Modern Language Association Convention, December 1998.

"Incarnate Words:  Nativism, The Body Politic, and Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures." Emory University, 1998.

"'The Helpless Plasticity of Childhood':  The Child Study Movement of the 1890s and Henry James" Modern Language Association Convention, December 1997.

"Southern Oratory and Women's Political Voice in The Planter's Northern Bride and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," American Literature Association Symposium, November 1997.

"Bawdy Talk:  The Politics of Women's Public Speech in The Lecturess and The Bostonians."  Modern Language Association Convention, December 1994.

Select Service

National

Contributing Editor, Journal of Race and Religion in the Americas, Rice University Press, 2007-present.

Executive Committee and Advisory Board Member, Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, 2006-2011.

Modern Language Association, Chair, American Literature Section Council, 2008-10.

Modern Language Association, Chair, American Literature Nominating Committee, 2006-2007.

Modern Language Association Advisory Council Member, Nineteenth-Century American Literature Section, 2005-2008.

Modern Language Association, Nineteenth-Century American Literature Section Delegate to the General Assembly, 2005-2008.

Chair, Gene Wise Sussman Prize Committee, American Studies Association, 2005-2007.

Huntington Library Fellowship Committee Panelist, 2007.

N.E.H. Fellowship Committee Panelist, 2004.

Member, Sakakibara Prize Committee, American Studies Association, 2003-05.

The Welfare of Children: Why Have Children Become so Central to Political Debates, National Public Radio, Chicago, Odyssey, March 25, 2004.

Organizer, Racialized Geographies: Remapping Southern Contact Zones,” American
Studies Association Annual Convention, November 2004. 

Organizer, “The ‘Place’ of Women’s Political Language in the Nineteenth-Century
Market,” American Studies Association Annual Convention, November 2002.

Moderator and Proposer, “Lee Edelman’s ’The Future is Kid Stuff’” Panel, Narrative Conference, Rice University, March 2001.

Special Issue Editor, "Sentimentality and the Body in U.S. Cultures," Modern Language Studies, Brown University, Volume 30, Spring 2000, 5-66.

Reader, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Ross Posnock, Editor, 2001-present.

Reader for:  ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, PMLA,  Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, The Henry James Review.

Tenure Review, Boston University, 2004; University of Oklahoma, 2004; UCLA, 2004; University of Arizona, 2005; Hunter College, 2006; University of Michigan 2007; Villanova University 2007. 

University

Member, Rice Leaders Program, 2007-08.

Member, Committee on the Rice Undergraduate Program, 2006-7.

Chair, Undergraduate Admissions Committee, Rice University, 2004-6.

Chair and Organizer, Caroline S. and David L. Minter Endowment, Rice University, 2002.

Organizer and Host, NPR Reporter and Human Rights Activist, Betty Rogers, “Sex Trafficking in Holland and Thailand.” Rice University Public Lecture Series, March 2001.

Division A Representative, University Council and Faculty Council, Rice University 2000-2.

Faculty Council Policy Committee, Faculty Appeals and Grievance Committee, 2001-2.

Organizer and Host, NPR Reporter and Human Rights Activist, Betty Rogers, “Sex Trafficking in Holland and Thailand.” Rice University Public Lecture Series, March 2001.

School of Humanities

Director, Humanities Research Center, 2005-2010.

Chair and Organizer, Americas Colloquium, School of Humanities, Rice University, 2004-8.

Member, Dean’s Planning Committee, School of Humanities, Rice University, 2004-6.

Advisory Panel, Center for the Study of Cultures, Rice University 2003-5.

Member, Dean of Humanities Search Committee, Rice University, 2002-3.

Department

Co-Chair, Americas Endowed Chair Search Committee, 2007-08.

Chair, Speaker’s Committee, Dept of English, Rice University, 2001-2005.

Member, Executive Committee, Dept of English, Rice University, 2001-2005.

Member, Graduate Committee, Dept of English, Rice University, 2004-2007.

Member, Twentieth-Century U.S. Search Committee, Dept of English, Rice University, 2002-3.

Member, Cultural Studies Search Committee, Dept of English, Rice University, 2001-2.

Select Teaching

Graduate Students:

Director

Elizabeth Fenton, PhD Dissertation: "Comparative Strangers: Anti-Catholicism, Liberalism, and American Literature 1776-1895," Defense March 2006. Assistant Professor, University of Vermont.

David Messmer, "'If Not in Word, In Sound': Politics of Sound in African American Writing from the Civil War to Civil Rights," Defense October 2008.

Molly Robey, "Sacred Geographies: Revelation and Nation in 19th-Century U.S.-Holy Land Literature," Defense March 2009.

Cory Ledoux, Exam: High Pass, October 2006.

Lilian Crutchfield, Exam: Scheduled May 2008.

Second Reader:

Outside Reader:

Ben Wise (History) 2008

Gale Kenny (History) 2007

Katie Knowles (History)

Recommenders

Dr. Kenneth Warren, William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor, 
University of Chicago

Dr. Ross Posnock, Professor of English, Columbia University

Dr. Shirley Samuels, Professor of English, Cornell University

Dr. Robert Levine, Professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park

Dr. Priscilla Wald, Professor of English, Duke University

Dr. Emory Elliott, University Professor and Director Centers for Ideas and Society,       University of California, Riverside