American Literary Studies

American literary studies in the UNM Department of English Language and Literature focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, with special areas of strength that include

• American Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism
• Nineteenth-Century Literary and Cultural History
• Chicana/o and Southwestern Cultural Studies
• African American Literature
• Poetry, Poetics, and Avant-Gardist Movements

 

Since the 1940s, UNM’s English Department has been nationally distinguished for its contributions to American literary scholarship--a distinction that increased in the 1970s, when the Department became the center of the Chicano/a and Native American literary renaissance. The faculty of UNM English, like our colleagues in American Studies and the Institute for American Indian Research (IFAIR), maintains a strong commitment to diversity and the future of Native American studies, at the highest levels, in New Mexico.

Our PhD program in American literatures and cultures emphasizes multidisciplinary approaches to the nineteenth century (especially prose) and the twentieth century (especially poetry), coupled with a well-defined sense of the recent and evolving intersections among practices of criticism, history, and theory. Current areas of faculty research involve projects of recovery and canonicity, comparative studies of identity, U.S. and global political formations, poetry and poetics, and visual culture, especially film.

The recent and forthcoming graduate courses offered in literature, culture, and theory, taken together, serve to indicate the richness and complementarity of UNM’s program in American Literary Studies. The following links will direct you to descriptions that include reading lists and may incorporate bibliographies and assignments as well:

American Realism and Naturalism
Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the West
Freaky Nineteenth-Century Narratives
Transatlantic Modernism
T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams
Wildness, Wilderness, and the Westering Imagination (C20 poetry)
Contemporary Innovators and Outsiders
Literature of the Mexican American War
Chicano/a Narrative
Mark Twain and Blackness/Race
Identity Politics and Twentieth Century Literature
Globalization and Literary Studies
Derrida and American Literature

Members of the American literature faculty edit and contribute to American Literary Scholarship and edit American Literary Realism. ALR is the leading journal in its field and regularly provides a fellowship to a PhD student pursuing American literary studies.

Core American Literary Studies Faculty

Jesse Alemán, Associate Professor
Finnie Coleman, Associate Professor
Scarlett Higgins, Assistant Professor
Matthew Hofer, Assistant Professor
Kadeshia Matthews, Assistant Professor
Gary Scharnhorst, Distinguished Professor
Hector Torres, Professor
Kathleen Washburn, Assistant Professor

The program and its students benefit from UNM’s Center for Southwest Research and its special collections. The manuscript collection houses more than 600 collections related to the culture of New Mexico, the American Southwest, and the Spanish borderlands, which includes a collection of American Indian oral histories. This material is an indispensable resource for anyone who wishes to conduct rigorous research into the literatures, cultures, and history of the greater Southwest; moreover, the Center’s pictorial collection contains 80,000 southwest-related images that date back to the 1850s, and its John Donald Robb Archives of Southwestern Music is dedicated to preserving the musical heritage of New Mexico and the Southwest.