My research investigates the ways in which the early United States’ relations with the broader Americas were defined through intersections of affect, revolutionary violence, and economic and political maneuvering; in classes I teach we trace these questions back before the creation of the nation, even to letters by Columbus. My current book project, Transamerican Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literary History, combines transamerican studies’ attention to cultural particularism and national exceptionalism with discussions of a U.S. literary sentimentalism grounded in national or transatlantic models. Another central interest that shapes both my research and my teaching is the study of ethnic U.S. literatures, particularly African American, Hispanic, and Native American.
Areas of specialization: Early American literature; eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century U.S. literature; ethnic U.S. literatures; environmental literature and ecocriticism; American and transamerican studies
Courses: American Literature to 1800; Ethnic American Literatures; Introduction to Literature
Maria Windell's curriculum vitae