Catherine Mainland
Bio
Catherine Mainland studied German in her native Scotland before moving to North Carolina in 2001. She received her MA and PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2003 and 2006, then a second MA in English Literature from NCSU in 2008. She teaches a range of American and Western World Literature survey courses and ENG 305: Women and Literature. She also teaches regularly in the NCSU Honors and Scholars Program, and she is on the advisory board of the MALS program, for which she develops and teaches graduate seminars.
Given her diverse research background, she considers herself a generalist. She has published and presented on Kate Chopin, Georg Hermann, Mary Shelley and ETA Hoffmann, and literature pedagogy. Her recent conference presentations examined domestic colonialism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and male hysteria in the works of Hawthorne, which is part of her broader research project in American and World literature.
In her spare time, Dr. Mainland writes fiction, reads in English, German, and Dutch, and talks about literature with her book club. If no-one else is available, she’ll also talk about literature to her cat, who enjoys this immensely. Her other hobbies include traveling, playing chess, practicing banjo, and eating.
Publications
Returning. Kindle Direct Publishing, 2021.
“Domestic Colonialism: Sophie von Sternheim’s Bourgeois Conquests” South Atlantic Review, 81:1, 2016.
“Teaching Literature like a Foreign Language” Pedagogy 13:1, 2013.
“Chopin’s Bildungsroman: Male Role Models in The Awakening” Mississippi Quarterly 64:1-22, 2011.
Dora and her Sisters. Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller, 2007.
Presentations
“The Middle-Class Burden: Domestic Colonialism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South,” presented in the “Victorian Women Novelists: Navigating Place in British Society” panel at the virtual South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, November 2020.
Co-Chair of the two “Silenced Masculinities” panels at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, November 2019.
“Hawthorne’s Hysterical Heroes,” presented in the “Navigating Neuroses and Hysteria” panel at the Carolina Conference for Romance Studies, March 2017, Chapel Hill.
“The Bruce: A Propagandist’s Handbook,” presented in the “Masculine and Feminine” panel at the Tennessee Philological Association conference, February 2013, Knoxville.
“Domestic Colonialism: Sophie von Sternheim’s Bourgeois Conquests,” presented in the “Armchair Travel: German II (1700-1933)” panel at the SAMLA conference, November 2012, RTP.
“All Gone to Look for America: American Travel Narratives of the 1790s,” presented in the “Our Neighbors, Ourselves” panel at the American Comparative Literature Conference, March 2009, Harvard.
“Olimpia and the Monster: Moving Beyond the Human in Frankenstein and ‘Der Sandmann,’” presented in the “Departing from the Grimms” panel at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, April 2008, Long Beach.
“Georg Hermann’s Rebellious Women,” presented in the “Literature of the Twentieth Century to 1945” panel at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, April 2007, Lexington.