Rebecca Walsh

Bio

The courses I typically teach focus on the literatures of transatlantic/transnational modernism, American literature and culture from the perspective of transnationalism and Empire, and world literature.  My research focuses on these areas, with particular attention to space/spatiality, migration, race, and gender/sexuality. I value interdisciplinary and cultural studies approaches to literature and film, and draw on cultural geography, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and feminist/queer theory. I was recently elected and served as Program Chair of the Modernist Studies Association and member of the MSA Board (2017-2020).

Earlier in my time at NC State I served as the faculty sponsor for our department’s Alpha Pi Theta chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English Honors society. Associate Professor Christopher Crosbie now serves as the new chapter sponsor.

Projects

My book, The Geopoetics of Modernism (University Press of Florida, February 2015), focuses on the intersections between globally-oriented modernist American poetry and academic and middlebrow forms of geography of the time, specifically the cosmological geography of Alexander von Humboldt and Mary Somerville, the environmental determinism of Ellen Churchill Semple, and versions of environmental determinism that animate the National Geographic Magazine.

I have also published essays on film, women’s writing and feminist theory, American Studies, and modernist literature, and have edited a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies entitled “Global Diasporas” which includes work by Moustafa Bayoumi, Sara Casteel Phillips, Chris Chekuri, Himadeep Mupidi, Aihwa Ong, and Rhacel Parrenas.

I am the current Co-Chair (with Celena Kusch)  of The H.D. International Society.  For information about the Society and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who generated significant modernist poetry, novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, and literary and film criticism, and who also starred in and helped generate avant garde film, check out the society’s website (which is hosted at NC State thanks to the English Department): http://hdis.chass.ncsu.edu/.

Publications

Selected publications include:

Books:

The Geopoetics of Modernism.  Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015.

Reviewed in:

Literature and History, vol. 26, no. 1 (2017), pp.  138-141:

http://journals.sagepub.com.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/doi/10.1177/0306197317706851n

Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 18, no. 4 (June 2017), pp. 600–601:

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1280446

American Literature, vol. 88, no. 2, 2016, pp. 411-14:

http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/content/88/2/411.citation

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Vol. 23, no. 2, 2016, pp. 471-72:

http://isle.oxfordjournals.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/content/early/2016/08/16/isle.isw053.full

Literary Geographies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, pp. 227-230:

http://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/article/view/2-11/pdf

Choice vol 52, no. 11 (July 2015) recommended book

South Atlantic Review, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Summer 2017), pp. 183-185.:

https://www-jstor-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/stable/90013655?refreqid=excelsior%3A851ad3f1751da5bd83980b9cc5115257&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents 

Articles and book review essays:

Book review of Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry (Harvard UP); Amy Moorman Robbins, American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form (Rutgers UP); and Christopher Schmidt, The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (Palgrave). American Literature 88.3 (Sept 2016): 648-50.

“Environmental Determinism and American Literature: Historicizing Geography and Form.” The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. Ed. Robert T. Tally, Jr. New York: Routledge. Forthcoming 2017.

“Narration and American Identity in Stein’s Later Prose Works.” MLA Approaches to Teaching Gertrude Stein. Ed. Deborah Mix and Logan Esdale. New York: MLA Association. Forthcoming 2017.

“Placing New Worlds: Trilogy as Geographical and Geopolitical Palimpsest.” H.D. and Modernity.  Ed. Hélène Aji, Antoine Cazé, Agnes Derail-Imbert, and Clément Oudart. Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2014. http://www.presses.ens.fr/produit.php?ref=978-2-7288-2510-3&id_rubrique=24

Review of Hsuan L. Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and Kristin J. Jacobson, Neodomestic American Fiction. In American Literature 85.4 (December 2013): 833-835. http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/content/85/4/833

“Approaches to Teaching Race in H.D.’s Work,”  MLA Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose.  Ed. Annette Debo and Lara Vetter. New York: Modern Language Association, 2011. 107-113.

“Sugar, Sex, and Empire: Gender Studies and Sarah Orne Jewett.” Blackwell’s Companion to American Studies. Ed. John Carlos Rowe.  Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.  303-319.

With Lauren Coats, Matt Cohen, John Miles, and Kinohi Nishikawa.  “‘Those we don’t speak of’:  Indians in The Village.”  PMLA 123.2 (2008): 438-451.

Guest Editor, special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 5.1 (2003), on “Global Diasporas.”

“Where Metaphor Meets Materiality: The Spatialized Subject and the Limits of Locational Feminism,” Exclusions in Feminist Thought: Challenging the Boundaries of Womanhood.  Ed. Mary Brewer.  Brighton, UK: SussexAcademic Press, 2002.  182-202.

Area(s) of Expertise

The courses I typically teach focus on the literatures of transatlantic/transnational modernism, American literature and culture from the perspective of transnationalism and Empire, and world literature. My research focuses on these areas, with particular attention to space/spatiality, migration, race, and gender/sexuality. I value interdisciplinary and cultural studies approaches to literature and film, and draw on cultural geography, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and feminist/queer theory.

Earlier in my time at NC State I served as the faculty sponsor for our department's Alpha Pi Theta chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English Honors society. Associate Professor Christopher Crosbie now serves as the new chapter sponsor.