BGSU English Department

Jolie A. Sheffer

Jolie A. Sheffer, Assistant Professor

jsheffe@bgsu.edu

414 East Hall
419-372-0589

 

Degrees and Institutions:

Ph.D., English Language & Literature, University of Virginia, 2007
M.A., English Language & Literature, University of Virginia, 2003
B.A., English, Northwestern University, 1998

Courses Taught:

ENG 2010 Introduction to Literature
ENG 2750 American Literature Survey 1865-1945
ENG 3020 Introduction to Literary Theory & Criticism
ENG 3100 Multi-Ethnic American Literature
ENG 4320 Turn-of-the-Century Fictions of the National Family
ENG 4800 / 5800 Asian American Literature and Culture
ENG 4990 Senior Thesis Workshop
ENG 6010 Introduction to English Studies (graduate)
ENG 6070 Methodology, Criticism, and Theory
ACS 6300 American Culture Studies Theory and Methods
ENG 5800/ACS 5860 American Ethnic Literature and Theories of Identity

 

Area: Literature

Research Interests: Twentieth-Century American Literature & Culture, Race & Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality, cultural studies and critical theory

Recent Publications:

The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1927. Rutgers University Press, January 2013. This book examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the inauguration of modern American multiculturalism. Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket), and Jane Addams embraced the image of the United States—and increasingly the world—as a mixed-race and multicultural nuclear family. These women writers reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women, which result in an incestuous, miscegenated nation. By confronting and conflating the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Linking literature to citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws, as well as transnational cultural and economic exchanges, I identify a more radical history of American multiculturalism than is currently acknowledged.

"'Citizen Sure Thing' or 'Jus' Foreigner'?: Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna's Orientalist Fiction," Journal of Asian American Studies (February 2010).  Forthcoming.

"Recollecting, Repeating and Walking Through: Immigration, Trauma, and Spatiality in Mary Antin's The Promised Land," MELUS (2010).  Forthcoming

"Standing on Top of the World: Masculinity and Imperialism on Everest." Sport, Rhetoric, Gender, and Globalization: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations, ed. Linda K. Fuller. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, (forthcoming).

Essay on The Promised Land by Mary Antin, Facts on File Companion to the American Novel, ed. Abby H. P. Werlock. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Review of Melting Pot Modernism by Sarah Wilson (2010). Modern Fiction Studies, forthcoming.

Review of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937, by Juliia H. Lee (2011). MELUS, forthcoming.

Book review. Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst (2003). Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2004.

Book review. 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism. Iris: A Journal About Women, Fall 2003.

Work In Progress: 

"Too Much/Not Enough: Troubling Masculinity in Asian American and Native American Popular Culture," College Literature special issue on "Native/Asian Encounters," edited by Hyoejin Yoon and Cari Carpenter.