Department of English > Graduate Programs

English Department Faculty by Area of Specialization: Early American Literature

Earlier American Literature at NIU

NIU graduate students who wish to specialize in American literature up to the Civil War can engage over 200 years of literary texts from varied and complex theoretical and cultural perspectives. Students may explore Native oral literature originating before Europeans ever settled on the American continent. They may consider questions of gender and sexuality. They may tackle questions of race and ethnicity relating to Native Americans, to African Americans, and to immigrant groups. They may analyze the variety of religious and political discourses. They may, in short, seek to answer St. Jean Baptiste de Crevecour’s question “What is an American?” in myriad ways.

Transnational American Literature

Dr. Adams-Campbell's research and teaching focus on early American literature broadly defined, from pre-contact Native American oral traditions to James Fenimore Cooper and other frontier fictions in the 1830s. Using transatlantic, post-colonial, and gender studies frameworks, Adams-Campbell considers colonial literatures that expand and challenge traditional stories and myths of the founding of the US. She teaches courses on early American literature, captivity narratives, Native American Literature, and women's literature. She is also interested in the history of the novel, book history, and popular fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.

Dr. Adams-Campbell is currently writing a monograph entitled New World Courtship: Mapping Marriage Narratives in Transatlantic Fiction, which explores gender roles and marriage expectations in novels from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries set in Canada, the Caribbean, New England and Virginia. She has written articles on Leonora Sansay's novel about the Haitian Revolution, early American captivity narratives, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, and teaching students to analyze representations of Native Americans in children's Thanksgiving picture books. More recently, she has collaborated with Mohawk story keepers at Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation for a project on women's roles in Mohawk oral tradition.

Multi-Cultural, Multi-Lingual, Multi-Religious Literature

Dr. Jeffrey Einboden’s research situates the Western canon within global contexts of culture, religion, and language. As a specialist in U.S. Romanticism, Einboden has explored the complex role played by the Middle East in the works of iconic American authors, interrogating processes of transnational exchange and intercultural translation. His Cambridge University doctoral work on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sufi poetry culminated in his book-length translation from the Persian poet Hafiz, entitled The Tangled Braid (co-authored with John Slater, 2009). In 2013, Einboden’s Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages was published by Edinburgh University Press, reading classic American authors as they now appear in Arabic, Hebrew and Persian translation.

Currently, Einboden is completing a monograph on Islam and Romanticism for Oneworld, tracing Western engagements with Muslim traditions, from Goethe to Emerson.

Einboden’s articles have appeared in prominent venues of Middle Eastern Studies, American Literary Studies, and Translation Studies. In 2011, Einboden received a National Endowment for the Humanities “Teaching Development Fellowship,” supporting the integration of his research on U.S. Arabic Slave Writings into classroom settings. In 2006, Einboden’s article on Goethe and Islamic sources, “The Genesis of Weltliteratur,” published in Literature and Theology, was selected by Oxford University Press as one of the 100 seminal articles published by the press during the past century.

Race, Gender, and the Fight for Equality

Dr. Deborah De Rosa’s research and teaching encompass antebellum and postbellum American literature, extending to very recent writing. Her work has focused on the archival recovery of children’s fiction by abolitionist women. Having located over 100 such narratives, she compiled them in Into the Mouths of Babes: An Anthology of Children's Abolitionist Literature (Greenwood Press, 2005) and presents her critical study of them in Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature: 1830-1865 (State University of New York Press, 2003). She is currently completing the transcription of domestic abolitionist texts that appeared in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and his Juvenile Poems, for the Use of Free American Children of Every Complexion. Such projects require her to intertwine archival research, history of the book, African American studies, and gender studies. De Rosa’s research reveals how, faced with the constructs of domesticity, women authors used the “safe” space of children’s literature to speak publically and directly about the abolitionist debate.

De Rosa extends her interests in abolitionism into her passion for African American literature, especially twentieth-century African-American women’s novels that depict the struggle for female solidarity and freedom, the core theme of her course on the African-American Womanist novel. De Rosa is also developing projects on Amy Tan, Linda See, and Grace Lin and hopes to teach a course on Chinese and Chinese American women’s experiences in China and America.

Finally, De Rosa’s work with American women writers has led to her fascination with women’s ghost stories, reflected in her special topics course on “American Ghosts” and an article in progress, “Patriarchal Weaponry Exposed: Sexual Mothers and Ghostly Daughters in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story,’ Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Giant Wisteria,’ and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘The Lost Ghost.’”

If you study Earlier American Literature at NIU

Whether challenging assumptions about what “American” literature might be, plumbing archives to expand the canon of early American literature, or investigating intellectual commerce between the Islamic world and the West prior to the U.S. Civil War, NIU’s Early Americanists are breaking new intellectual ground. We welcome students who are likewise willing to approach the period with fresh eyes, who are eager to grapple with canonical texts in new ways or uncover archival works that extend the field’s boundaries.

For More Information

If you have any questions, please call (815-753-1608), email (valtmaier@niu.edu), or stop by the Department of English Graduate Studies office in Reavis 215.

M.A. in British and American Literature program requirements < http://catalog.niu.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=19&poid=3300&returnto=454>

Ph.D. in English requirements < http://catalog.niu.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=19&poid=3254&returnto=582>

Admissions < http://www.engl.niu.edu/graduate/admissions.shtml#native>