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
ENGL 1320 - The Short Story
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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
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Spring 2021 / Spring 2022
Students will learn how writings by African American, Native American and Indigenous, Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x, Asian American, and/or Arab American authors are central to the US literary tradition. The class explores the significance of ethnic US literatures and cultures through short stories, novels, plays, films, and more.
ENGL 2017 - World Literature
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Spring 2023
Songs. Epics. Autobiographies. Novels. Tales. Plays. Films. These genres appear across cultures, languages, and historical periods. This course focuses on how genres work in a variety of cultures and time periods, reading work written in English and in translation. Students will gain a deep understanding of the possibilities of that genre as well as an introduction to the way that literature travels between cultures. Topics and focus will vary by instructor.
ENGL 2102 - Literary Analysis
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Spring 2018 / Spring 2019
Students will build skills in careful, detailed reading and critical writing. Focusing on poetry, prose, and plays, the course cultivates an understanding of literary forms and genres and introduces techniques and vocabulary essential for the study of literature.
ENGL 2115 - American Frontiers
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Fall 2018 / Fall 2019 / Fall 2023
This course explores the power of the frontier myth in US literature and culture. The material we cover may range from stories of the American West and American empire to frontiers like cyberspace or outer space (the final frontier). Texts may include short stories, novels, movies, photographs, and computer games.
ENGL 2655 - American Literature to the Civil War
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Spring 2019 / Spring 2021
Students will explore chaos, possibilities, and violence in American literature as Indigenous lands transform into British colonies transform into a nation that expands across the continent, but nearly implodes in civil war. This class considers how authors struggling to define America used a rising print culture and evolving literary landscape to confront issues of nation, empire, race, gender, sexuality, religion, modernity, and industrialization.
ENGL 3005 - The Literature of New World Encounters
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Fall 2023
This course explores how literary, cultural, and historical works stage intersections and encounters between European settlers and Indigenous peoples. Christopher Columbus�s epochal journey brought the Old World (Asia, Africa, Europe) into contact with the New World (the Americas), setting in motion the diffusion of plants, animals, peoples, and pathogens. Students will think about the economic, cultural, historical, and biological consequences of the European invasion and settlement of the Americas.
ENGL 3025 - America: Colony, Nation, World
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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 3235 - American Novel
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Fall 2018 / Fall 2020 / Fall 2022
This class explores how over two centuries of Americans have shaped the novel and how the novel has shaped America. What themes or crises define the �American novel�? How do immigrant authors, writers of color, Indigenous novelists, and queer or working class authors unsettle the American stories we think we know? Together we�ll ask how the transformation of America is made visible in the novel�s shifting boundaries and forms.
ENGL 3856 - Topics in Genre Studies
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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 - Capstone in Literary Studies
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Fall 2019
Topic varies by section, but all sections include small seminar discussions and focus on an individualized research project related to the topic. This course will draw on skills from previous courses in critical reading, thinking, and writing and will culminate in high-level discussions and in the final project. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours.
ENGL 4697 - Special Topics in Ethnic US Literatures
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Fall 2019 / Spring 2024
This course will go in-depth into a special topic in ethnic US literatures through texts drawn from African American, Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x, Native American and Indigenous, Asian American, and/or Arab American traditions. Topics vary by semester. Check department description for details. Same as ETHN 4692.
ENGL 4830 - Honors Thesis
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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
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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 Ethnic US Literatures
Primary Instructor
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Fall 2019
This course will go in-depth into a special topic in ethnic US literatures through texts drawn from African American, Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x, Native American and Indigenous, Asian American, and/or Arab American traditions. Topics vary by semester. Check department description for details. Same as ENGL 4697.
