American Area

At Notre Dame, the American Area has strengths in a number of areas, including nineteenth-century studies, comparatist and transnational approaches, and modern poetry and poetics. American area faculty and students have strong ties to the Africana Studies Department, the Institute for Latino/a Studies, and the Gender Studies program.

The American Area faculty at the University of Notre Dame is well represented in both American literature before 1900 and contemporary American literature.

American Literature before 1900

Sandra M. Gustafson is the author of Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. She recently organized a conference on "Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in Early America" at the American Antiquarian Society, where she also delivered the James Russell Wiggins Lecture on "The Emerging Media of Early America." Read full profile >

Glenn Hendler is the author of Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the co-editor of Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture.
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J. Javier Rodriguez is completing a book-length study on Mexican War literature in the United States and Mexico. Read full profile >

Thomas A. Werge is the author of Thomas Shepard and co-editor of Religion and Literature, which is based at Notre Dame.
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Ivy Wilson brings the insights of African American Studies to new readings of Melville and Whitman, and has recently published "On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and 'The Heroic Slave'" in PMLA. Read full profile >

Modern and Contemporary American Literature

Jacqueline Vaught Brogan most recently authored The Violence Within/The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics. Read full profile >

Stephen Fredman’s recent books include A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry and A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. He specializes in modern poetry and poetics. Read full profile >

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is the author of Reading on the Edge: Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce, Baldwin. Her current project uses hemispheric and comparatist methodologies to explore the relation between modernism and race. Read full profile >

Theresa Delgadillo specializes in Latino/a literature and is completing a book on Latina writers and spirituality.
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Toni Irving works on sexuality in novels by contemporary African American women. Read full profile >

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