Though facing the challenges of a marriage between two
English professors in a bustling and competitive profession (I married
my graduate school sweet heart) I have been fortunate to shift teaching
positions several times. While in transition from one location to another,
the relationship between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson became
the focus of a year-long Mellon Fellowship granted to me by Harvard University.
While there, I framed the central theoretical dimensions of my book, Feminist
Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Cornell
University Press, l995). In my view, Fuller's skill as a translator became
the operative metaphor for her skill as a cultural critic. My research
for this project incorporated all the sources normally used by a biographer
(journals and letters) even as the primary interpretive emphasis remained
the published works of Fuller and Emerson. Choice selected Feminist
Conversations as one of its Outstanding Books for l995.
Long before completing Feminist Conversations, I had begun developing
courses in American literature which brought together traditions previously
kept separate, notably those involving African-American and Anglo-American
texts. This focus, begun at Reed, enabled me to teach a Residential College
Seminar sponsored by Branford and Davenport Colleges at Yale University
one spring, where student interest in the topic was quite high. From the
experience of that one seminar I wrote and published an article on Uncle
Tom's Cabin which has since been anthologized in the Norton Critical
Edition of Stowe's work.
When I arrived at Haverford, I found student interest in these matters
equally strong and began teaching similar courses. With its Quaker background
and emphasis on social justice, Haverford affords a unique opportunity
to explore this direction in my work as a teacher and scholar. Over time,
my design and participation in both student and faculty seminars has informed
my scholarly concern with the vital if vexed conversation between black
and white authors in the United States, the subject of my next book, tentatively
titled The Awful Rehearsal: Trauma, Terror, and Black Reconstruction.
In Feminist Conversations, I explored the importance of Margaret
Fuller’s influence over Emerson by recasting the idea of influence
itself. Emerson’s abundant address to Fuller throughout his journals,
letters, and essays not only helps to recover Fuller from her critical
obscurity but also opens to view the broader register of Fuller’s
comparativist training. Increasingly my focus on translation as it functions
in comparative readings of culture led me to trauma theory, in part because
recent work builds upon subtle transformations of translation theory.
Thus, for example, Jean Laplanche, whose new foundation for psychoanalysis
entails a revision of Freud’s seduction theory through translation,
provides a particularly useful source for imagining a new foundation for
U.S. literary history. I’ve begun to articulate the value of trauma
theory for a revision of our literary history in several recent essays.
Working with psychoanalytic theories it was inevitable that I would discover
how my engagement with this material emerged from the bumpy history we
call “the sixties." My investment in that moment (experienced
at once too early and too late) motivates my immersion in the recent scholarship
on trauma theory. My research has been enhanced by participation in several
Humanity Center and Tri-College faculty seminars and in a reading group
with senior members of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis
(now the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia).
Over the last several years, I have attended many conferences, delivering
papers and exposing myself to a range of approaches to trauma and cultural
history. Several years ago, I served as representative to the MLA Delegate
Assembly for the Division dedicated to Psychological Approaches to Literature.
More recently I have served on the Board of Supervisors for the English
Institute at Harvard University.
Curriculum Vitae
Education:
Ph.D., American Civilization, Brown University, l98l
A.B., American Culture, Mount Holyoke College, l972
Employment:
Haverford College, Associate Professor of English, 1993,
Chair of English Department l999—2002. Assistant Professor of English
l988-1992;
Harvard University, Mellon Faculty Fellow, English, l986-87
Yale University, Visiting Lecturer (English), spring l986, Branford and
Davenport Colleges
Reed College, Instructor of English and Humanities, l979-1981, Assistant
Professor of
English and Humanities, 1981-l985
Kenyon College, Visiting Instructor of English, l978-9
Publications:
Book:
Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, l995).
Selected for Choice list of Outstanding Academic Books, l995.
Nominated for 1995 MLA Prize for a First Book
Articles:
“Du Bois on Trauma: Psychoanalysis and the Would-Be Black Savant.”
Cultural Critique 51 (Spring 2002), 1-39.
"The Work of Trauma: Fuller, Douglass, and Emerson on the Border
of Ridicule,” Studies in Romanticism, 41: 1 (Spring 2002),
65-88.
"The Storied Facts of Margaret Fuller," The New England
Quarterly, LXIX (March l996): 128-142.
"Foot-noting the Sublime: Margaret Fuller on Black Hawk's Trail,"
American Literary History, 5
(Winter l993): 616-642.
"Womanizing Margaret Fuller: Theorizing a Lover's Discourse,"
Cultural Critique 16 (Fall l990):
161-191.
"Feminism in Translation: Margaret Fuller's Tasso,” Studies
in Romanticism 29: 3 (Fall l990):
463-490.
"Emerson as `Mythologist' in the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
Ossoli," Criticism 31: 3 (Summer,
l989): 213-233.
"Fathering and Blackface in Uncle Tom's Cabin," Novel
23: 3 (Spring, l989): 1-15.
"Emerson's `Scene' Before the Women: The Feminist Poetics of Paraphernalia,"
Social Text l8
(Winter l987-88): 129-144.
"Woman as Force in Twain's Joan of Arc: The Unwordable
Fascination," Criticism 28 (Winter
l985): 57-72.
Chapters in Books:
“Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” American History
Through Literature: 1820-1870, Editors in Chief, Janet Gabler-Hover,
Robert Sattelmeyer, pp. 1258-1264 (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
2006).
"Fuller's Scene Before the Women: Woman in the Nineteenth Century,"
The Norton Critical Edition
of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Larry Reynolds (New York:
Norton, l998), 272-
278.
"Reading Before Marx: Margaret Fuller and the New-York Daily
Tribune," in Readers in History :
Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response,
ed. James L.
Machor (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, l993): 228-258.
"Margaret Fuller," A Companion to American Thought,
eds. Richard Fox and James Kloppenberg
(Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, l994): 848-849.
“Fathering and Blackface in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”
The Norton Critical Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
ed. Elizabeth Ammons [New York: Norton, l994]: 568-584.
“Woman as Force in Twain’s Joan of Arc: The Unwordable Fascination,”
Critical Assessments of
Mark Twain, Stuart Hutchinson, ed. V. III [Essex, England: Helm Information
Limited, l993]:
555-568.)
.
Selected Reviews:
Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (New York: Oxford
UP, l999), in
Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, Vol.2, #1 (Summer 2000).
E-Journal (2000
words). Jacobusreview.html
Homer, Odyssey, Trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 2000) in Bryn
Mawr Classical Review (Summer 2000.07.06). E-Journal (2847 words).
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2000/2000-07-06.html
Recent Invited Papers:
"The Awful Rehearsal: Frederick Douglass on Moving Things,"
Department of English, Princeton University, April 2006.
"The Awful Rehearsal: Frederick Douglass on Moving Things,"
Art on the Edge: Aesthetic Encounters at the Limits of Representation,"
Haverford College, April 2006.
"Translating Traumas of Value in Fuller's Eckermann," Modern
Language Association, Washington D.C., December 2005.
“Off the Tracks: Trains and Trauma Theory in Frederick Douglass.”
Local Americanists Lecture Series, “Trauma Theory and African American
Literature: A Symposium.” University of Maryland, February 2005.
"Traumas of Value in the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,"
American Literature and Culture Seminar,
Harvard Humanities Center, November 2004.
Work in Progress:
Book:
The Awful Rehearsal: Trauma, Terror, and Black Reconstruction
In his clever transformation of the mind-cure tradition after Mesmer,
Freud reduced the site of trauma, making the possibility of its productive
transformation in social practice less visible and urgent. I'm interested
in the cultural worlds occluded by Freud. Thinking about trauma theory
as a horizon of experience and cultural activity above which the term
crisis invariably arose allows us to consider how writers like Douglass,
Fuller, Stowe, Marx, James, and Du Bois experiment with conflicting theories
of trauma. Swerving from readings where death remains the central focus,
this study considers the place of freedom in early trauma theory and practice.
Recent Senior Essays:
Naomi Fetterman, "The Distortions of Love: The Doppelganger
of Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty."
Prentiss Clark, "Literature as Performance: Founding Spaces for
Voice."
Rakia Clark, "The Influence of African American Folklore in Song
of Solomon."
Matt Osypowski, "Dean."
Formal Humanities Lectures at Reed:
"The Good Bright Light of Evidence: Homer and the Historians"
"Plato and Useful Fictions"
"St. Augustine and the Long-Drawn Lie"
"On the Uses of Decorum: Castiglione and His Age"
"Cicero: Rhetorical Living"
Selected Seminars Taught at Haverford:
After Mastery:
Trauma, Reconstruction, and the Literary Event
After Mastery: Melville and Twain
Shifting Subjects: Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville
Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading
Storytelling and the Ruins of Feminism
John Brown’s Body: Violence, National Fantasy, and Bodies that Matter
200 Level Courses:
Race, Writing, and Difference in American
Literature
Portraits in Black: The Influence of an Emergent African-American Culture
Telling Tales: Short Story
In the American Grain: Traditions in American Literature
Feminist and Gender Studies Seminar (Bi-College)
Other Courses at Haverford:
Freshmen Writing Seminars
Junior Seminar
Other Courses at Reed:
Humanities (Homer to Aristotle, The Middle Ages, Italian Renaissance)
Creative Writing
Specialized Courses in American Literature across the Centuries
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