Deborah De Rosa

Associate Professor
Later 19th-century American Literature

Office: RH 225
Email: derosa@niu.edu

Educational Background

  • Ph.D. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; 1998
  • M.A. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; 1991
  • B.A. Barnard College of Columbia University New York; 1988

Professional Interests

  • Abolitionist literature
  • Children’s literature
  • Slave and Captivity Narratives
  • Ghost Stories
  • Womanism and Women Writers, including Toni Morrison, Amy Tan and J.K. Rowling
  • YA Multicultural Literature

Selected Awards

  • Schriber Scholar, Department of English, 2019-2021

Selected Publications

  • “Bridges to Self: Material Culture and Emotional Transnationalism in Grace Lin’s Picture Books.” The Lion and the UnicornForthcoming.
  • “‘I do want to be a good woman once’: Louisiana’s Civil Code of 1870 and the Denied Lagniappe in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s ‘Tony’s Wife.’” Women's Studies An Inter-disciplinary Journal. October 15, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2020.1824916.  
  • Editor, Into the Mouths of Babes: An Anthology of Children’s Abolitionist Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 2005.
  • Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature: 1830-1865. New York: State University of New York Press, 2003.
  • “A Womanist Approach.” The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu. Greenwood Press, 2002. 39-49.
  • From the Liberator’s “Juvenile Department” to Juvenile Poems, for the Use of Free American Children of Every Complexion: William Lloyd Garrison and Abolitionist Literature for Children, 1831-1835. In progress.