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Windell, Maria A.

Associate Professor

Positions

Research Areas research areas

Research

research overview

  • Dr. Windell’s research and teaching emphasize ethnic and transnational US literatures and history. Her book, Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History (Oxford UP 2020), examines how writers of color and women writers used genre as a tool to navigate the racialized and gendered violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. Her current project uses nineteenth-century US naval writings as a connective thread to link the Middle East, Pacific, Caribbean, and US-Mexico borderlands. In so doing, it highlights US imperialism as a reactive force—one shaped by the decisions, actions, and sovereignties of Pacific Islanders, Caribbean pirates, Dominican and Mexican women, Muslim immigrants, and Tejano Confederates. Her work has appeared in journals including J19, Studies in American Fiction, and American Literary Realism, and she co-edited, with Jesse Alemán, a special issue of English Language Notes on “Latinx Lives in Hemispheric Context” (56.2).

keywords

  • Ethnic US literatures, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US literature, transamerican studies, American Studies

Publications

selected publications

Teaching

courses taught

  • ENGL 1320 - The Short Story
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2024
    Short stories offer writers the freedom to build new worlds, create new characters, try out new narrative voices and structures, and explore new ideas�again and again. You will read a range of authors and genres as you consider this dynamic, powerful, and widely varied form.
  • ENGL 1800 - American Ethnic Literatures
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2021 / Spring 2022
    Introduces significant fiction by ethnic Americans. Explores both the literary and the cultural elements that distinguish work by these writers. Emphasizes materials from Native American, African American, and Chicano traditions.
  • ENGL 2017 - World Genres
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2023
    Explores literary form and language in a wide range of cultures, introducing students to the global English literary tradition, comprising multiple lineages. Introduces students to poetry, narrative, drama, orality, media, digitality, and/or other genres drawn from diverse traditions, each locally historicized and contextualized.
  • ENGL 2102 - Literary Analysis
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2018 / Spring 2019
    Provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through close attention to poetry and prose.
  • ENGL 2115 - American Frontiers
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2018 / Fall 2019 / Fall 2023
    Considers the backdrop of the American West in literature, film, photography and computer gaming. Focuses on a range of narratives and images depicting this wide swathe of American geography while simultaneously cultivating close reading skills, digital media analysis and film analysis that will aid in deeper insights at the textual level.
  • ENGL 2655 - Introduction to American Literature I
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2019 / Spring 2021
    Chronological survey of the literature from Bradford to Whitman.
  • ENGL 3005 - The Literature of New World Encounters
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2023
    Explores American literature as a site of cultural intersection between European settlers and indigenous peoples.
  • ENGL 3025 - America: Colony, Nation, World
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2023
    This course explores how literature creates, complicates, and nuances narratives of the United States from its early beginnings to the contemporary moment. The course may focus on a specific context (for example, the US and the Americas; regionalism; neoliberalism), period (for example, pre-Civil War, Reconstruction, post-1945), or genre (for example, travel narratives; political writing; legal cases).
  • ENGL 3060 - Modern and Contemporary Literature for Nonmajors
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2020
    Close study of significant 20th-century poetry, drama, and prose works. Readings range from 1920s to the present.
  • ENGL 3235 - American Novel
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2018 / Fall 2020 / Fall 2022
    Surveys the American novel. Covers the early development of the American novel, its rise in the 19th- and 20th-centuries, and its contemporary expressions. Students will be introduced to theories of the novel, the major movements and authors, as well as the characteristics that define the American novel as unique.
  • ENGL 3856 - Topics in Genre Studies
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2018
    Studies special topics in genre studies; specially designed for English majors. Topics vary each semester. May be repeated for a total of 6 credit hours for different topics.
  • ENGL 4039 - Critical Thinking in English Studies
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2019
    Concerned with developments in the study of literature that have significantly influenced our conception of the theoretical bases for study and expanded our understanding of appropriate subject matter. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours.
  • ENGL 4697 - Special Topics in Multicultural and Ethnic American Literature
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2019 / Spring 2024
    Provides advanced in-depth study of literatures written by ethnic American authors. Texts may be drawn from a range of African-American, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American or Indigenous literature traditions. Topics vary each semester. Same as ETHN 4692.
  • ENGL 4830 - Honors Thesis
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2019 / Spring 2020 / Spring 2024
    Students accepted to English Departmental Honors are enrolled in this course.
  • ENGL 5109 - Literature and Culture of the United States
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2019 / Spring 2022 / Fall 2022
    Introduces graduate level study of writing of the United States from its inception to the present. Emphasizes a wide range of genres, forms, historical background, and secondary criticism. Topics will vary. May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours.
  • ETHN 4692 - Special Topics in Multicultural and Ethnic American Literature
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2019
    Provides advanced in-depth study of literatures written by ethnic American authors. Texts may be drawn from a range of African-American, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American or Indigenous literature traditions. Topics vary each semester. Same as ENGL 4697.

Background

International Activities

geographic focus

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