BIOCRITICAL
SKETCH
Like
many academic women of my generation, graduate students in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, I discovered "consciousness-raising" and
feminism at the same time that I was passing doctoral exams and
developing a dissertation topic. Although I had not been able
to study either women writers or American literature as a graduate
student (neither at that time were considered worth serious scholarship
in most graduate schools of English), it seemed to me that the
feelings I had had since my earliest memory of having been "marked" by
being an intellectual woman also characterized fiction by some
of the classic writers in American literature. I decided to write
a dissertation, which I later published as a book, in which I
explored the relationship between what William Faulkner called "the
mark" (or social stigma) and "the knowledge" (the
visionary understanding that marginalized persons sometimes achieve),
and that seemed to characterize the social focus of the American
writer, at least in novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison. The suppressed and unwritten text
of the book was that it characterized my own condition as well,
as a woman literary critic unable, yet, to imagine turning my
knowledge to the service of women writers themselves.
That "the
mark" leads to "the knowledge" has in a way
characterized my intellectual concerns ever since--both in
the development of my interests in feminist literary criticism
in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the University of Tennessee
and my participation in the collective effort to reprint significant
texts by nineteenth-century American women writers; then later
in my choice to leave teaching for awhile and earn a M.S.W.
in psychoanalytic social work practice; still later in my subsequent
return to teaching and the academic world through five years
serving as Coordinator of the Curriculum Inclusion Project
and Professor of Women's Studies at SUNY-College at Plattsburgh
before joining the English and Women's Studies faculties at
University at Albany in 1995. "The mark and the knowledge" also
explains my interest in feminist standpoint theory, in which
the social conditions of women and other oppressed people may
be understood as creating the potential for a particular way
of knowing that has been termed "epistemic privilege."
In
the literature classroom I work across disciplinary lines, bringing
feminist, social, cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts
to bear on students' understanding of literary texts; and in
courses in Women's Studies and feminist theory, I introduce students
to literary works, urging an affective as well as an intellectual
and theoretical understanding of women's condition, both in the
U.S. and in an emerging global feminism. Four years of training
and practice in an object-relations based, psychosocial model
of listening has altered my pedagogy and increased my interest
in teaching the "whole" student within a context of
teacher-student partnering in the classroom. I am interested
in articulating a methodology for Women's Studies that identifies
a critical cross-cultural interdisciplinarity as the particularly
situated characteristic of Women's Studies in the new configuration
of disciplines in the 21st-century university. My ongoing teaching
and research interests reflect all of the above, and continue
to focus, in literary and cultural studies, on the work of American
women regionalist writers, particularly Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary
Wilkins Freeman, and Mary Austin.
I
have served as President of the National Women's Studies Association
(1995-96), completed a three-year term on the Editorial Board
for the journal American Literature (1996-99), and served as
Chair of the NWSA Task Force on Faculty Roles and Rewards, 1998-99,
that drafted the statement, "Defining Women's Studies Scholarship," available
at www.nwsa.org.
EDUCATION
- M.S.W.,
Clinical Practice. State University of New York, Albany (1988)
- Ph.D., Literature.
University of California, Santa Cruz (1973)
- M.A., Literature.
University of California, Santa Cruz (1969)
- B.A., English.
Ohio State University (1968)
UNDERGRADUATE
COURSES
- WSS 220
Introduction to Feminist Theory
WSS 308 Global Perspectives on Women
WSS 450 Literature of Feminism
ENG 210 Introduction to Literary Studies
ENG 353Q William Faulkner
ENG 354 Jewett and Cather
ENG 366/ WSS 366 African American Writers
ENG 432 Colonial American Literature to 1820
ENG 434 American Literature 1865-1920
GRADUATE
COURSES
- WSS 550
Literature of Feminism
WSS 565 Feminist Theory
WSS 590 Research Seminar
WSS 798Q Feminist Standpoint Theory
ENG 581 Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism: Writing Gender,
Race, and Empire in the Late 19th-Early 20th Century U.S.
ENG 680 Problems in Period and Canon: The Problem of Realism
ENG 681 Authors and Critics: 20th Century U.S. Writing
ENG 684 Seminar: William Faulkner
ENG 685 Seminar: Sexual Modernism
ENG 685R Seminar: Literature of/and Feminism
ENG 700 History of English Studies (Textual Practices I)
ENG 703 Gender, Race and Class in English Studies
SIGNIFICANT
PUBLICATIONS
A. Books
1. Critical
Books
Writing
Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture,
co-authored with Judith Fetterley (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois
Press, 2003)
The
Mark and the Knowledge: Social Stigma in ClassicAmerican Fiction (Columbus:
Ohio State Univ. Press for Miami University, 1979)
2. Edited
Books
In
the "Strange People's" Country, by Mary Noailles
Murfee (1891); critical edition with introduction (under contract;
University of Nebraska Press)
American
Women Regionalists 1850-1910: A Norton Anthology, with
critical headnotes and introduction, co-edited with Judith
Fetterley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992)
Stories
from the Country of Lost Borders, by Mary Austin, edited
with critical introduction (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press,
1987)
Conjuring:
Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, co-edited
with Hortense Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985)
Selected
Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited with introduction
and afterword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983)
3. Book-length
Instructional Monographs
Teaching
with the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fourth
Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994)
A
Course Guide to Accompany the Norton Anthology of American
Literature, Third Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989)
B. Critical
Articles
"Stowe
and Regionalism," in Cindy Weinstein, ed. Cambridge Companion
to Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2004)
"Literary Regionalism and Global Capital: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women
Writers," in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, special editor, "Feminist
Transnationalisms," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (2004)
"'I was country when country wasn't cool': Regionalizing the Modern in
Jewett's A Country Doctor," American Literary Realism 34:3
(Spring 2002), 217-32
"Exploring
Contact: Regionalism and the 'Outsider' Standpoint in Mary Noailles
Murfreeís Appalachia," Legacy 17:2 (2000), 199-212
"Trans/Feminist
Methodology: Bridges to Interdisciplinary Thinking," NWSA
Journal 12:2 (Summer 2000), 105-118
"Sex,
Class, and 'Category Crisis': Reading Jewett's Transitivity," American
Literature 70:3 (Fall 1998)
"Critical
Interdisciplinarity, Womenís Studies, and Cross-Cultural Insight," NWSA
Journal 10:1 (Spring 1998), 1-22
"On
'Reading New Readings of Regionalism'," with Judith Fetterley, Legacy 15:1
(1998), 45-52
"Teaching
American Literature as Cultural Encounter: Models for Organizing
the Introductory Course," in Rethinking American Literature,
eds. Lil Brannon and Brenda Greene (Urbana: NCTE Press, 1997),
175-92
"Writing
Out of the Gap: Regionalism, Resistance, and Relational Reading," A
Sense of Place, eds. Christian Riegel, Herb Wylie, Karen
Overbye, and Don Perkins (Alberta, Canada: University of Alberta
Press, 1997), pp. 19-34
"Origins
of Literary Regionalism: Gender in Irving, Stowe, and Longstreet," in
Sherrie Inness and Diana Royer, eds., Breaking Boundaries:
New Perspectives on Regional Writing (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1997), pp. 17-37
"Affective
Teaching for Our Lives: Singing in the Feminist Theory Classroom," Women's
Studies Quarterly 25, Nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 1997),
174-82; Twenty-Fifth Anniversary reprint of article that originally
appeared in Women's Studies Quarterly 22, Nos. 1 & 2
(Spring/Summer 1994), 26-34
"'Outgrown
Friends,' by Sarah Orne Jewett," archival manuscript edited
with introduction, New England Quarterly 69:3 (September
1996), 461-72
"Regionalism," in
Richard Fox and James Kloppenberg, eds., A Companion to American
Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 574-76
"Mary
Wilkins Freeman," in Cathy Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin,
eds., The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United
States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 329
"Mary
Noailles Murfree," in Cathy Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin,
eds. The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United
States (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 591
"Reading
Regionalism: The 'Difference' It Makes," in Regionalism
Reconsidered: New Approaches to the Field, ed. David Jordan
(New York: Garland, 1994), 47-63
"Archives
of Female Friendship and the 'Way' Jewett Wrote," New
England Quarterly 66:1 (March 1993), 47-66
"'Distilling
Essences': Regionalism and 'Women's Culture,'"American
Literary Realism 25:2 (Winter 1993), 1-15
"A
Developmental Approach to Curriculum Transformation," Transformations (Fall,
1991), 66-76
"Mary
E. Wilkins Freeman," in Elaine Showalter, ed., Modern
American Women Writers (New York: Scribner's, 1990), 141-153
"Zora
Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the 'Ancient Power' of Black
Women," Introduction to Pryse and Spillers, eds., Conjuring (1985),
1-24
"'Pattern
Against the Sky: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry's The
Street," in Pryse and Spillers, eds., Conjuring (1985),
116-131
"An
Uncloistered 'New England Nun,'" Studies in Short Fiction 20
(1983), 289-96; reprinted in Shirley Marchalonis, ed., Critical
Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991),
139-145
"Women
'At Sea': Sarah Orne Jewett's 'The Foreigner,'" American Literary
Realism 15 (1982), 244-52; reprinted in Gwen L. Nagel, ed., Critical
Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.,
1984)
"Alice
Cary: 1820-1871," co-authored with Judith Fetterley, Legacy 1,
No. 1 (1984), 1-3
"Literary
Regionalism and the 'General Gender': Time, Place, Myth and Friendship," Bennington
Review No. 16 (1984), 23-29
"The
Humanity of Women in Freeman's 'A Village Singer,'" Colby
Library Quarterly 19 (1983), 69-77
"Introduction" to
Mary Wilkins Freeman, "A Mistaken Charity," Boston
Review 8, No. 3 (1983), 11
"Introduction" to
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1981), v-xx
"Miniaturizing
Yoknapatawpha: The Unvanquished as Faulknerís Theory of
Realism," Mississippi Quarterly 33 (1980), 343-54
"Lust
for Audience: An Interpretation of Othello," English Literary
History (ELH) 43 (1976), 461-78
"Race:
Faulkner's 'Red Leaves,'" Studies in Short Fiction 12
(1975), 133-38
"Denise
Levertov's 'The Stonecarver's Poem': A Linguistic Interpretation," Language
and Style 7 (1974), 62-71
"Ralph
Ellison's Heroic Fugitive," American Literature 46
(1974), 1-15
C. Short
Fiction
"Lonely-Hearts," Numen No.
1 (1980, New Southern Writing): 43-54
"Personal
Effects," Story Quarterly, No. 2/3 (1976): 48-51;
reprinted in Mother Jones 1, No. 7 (1976): 46-53
ACADEMIC
GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND AWARDS
Council
of Graduate Schools/Ford Foundation Planning Grant, Professional
Master's
Program
in Women, Civil Society Leadership, and Public Policy, co-principal
investigator with Dr. Judith Saidel, Executive Director, Center
for Women in Government and Public Policy, January-October, 2004
($5000)
Honors
Incentive Grant, Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies,
University at Albany, Faculty-Undergraduate Student Collaborative
Research Project, 2003-04 ($2000)
Chancellor's
Award for Excellence in Teaching, State University of New York,
2000
President's
Award for Excellence in Teaching, University at Albany, SUNY,
2000
Interfaith
Hunger Appeal Matching Funds Grant, Faculty Seminar: Women,
Education, and
Global Development, Spring Semester 1995 ($1400)
SUNY
UUP Classroom Scholarship Grant, Global Perspectives on Women's
Issues, Fall
Semester 1994 ($2000)
NEH
Summer Stipend, American Literary Regionalism: A Women's Genre,
Summer 1985
USICA
American Participant Grantee in Colombia, Uruguay, and Chile,
September 1980
Faculty
Research Award, University of Tennessee, Summer 1979
Dissertation
Year Fellow, Danforth Foundation, 1971-72
NDEA
Title IV Fellow, 1969-71
Honorary
Woodrow Wilson Fellow, 1968.
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