Jennifer Desiderio

Jennifer is interested in early American literature, which includes women's writing, slave narratives, and the novel. Everything about early American literature, culture, authorship, and politics interests me. Desiderio particularly relishes teaching and reading Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, Charles Brocken Brown, and lesser-known but equally important and engaging American authors. Desiderio has taught classes on The American Renaissance, The Literature of the Civil War, The Seduction Novel, Captivity Narratives, The Rise of the American Novel, and The Slave and Neo Slave Narrative, and much more. Desiderio has directed theses on a wide variety of topics, from Toni Morrison's novels to The Scarlet Letter, and from The Orphan Figure in Literature to Emily Dickinson's poetry.

Awards

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Teaching Award 2017
College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Summer Grant 2007

Publications

“Writing Lives: Autobiography in Early America,” A Companion to American Literature, Volume 1, Edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul, New York: Wiley-Blackwell (Second Edition): Forthcoming.

“’Oh! If I Were A Man!”: Marital Entrapment in Susanna Rowson’s Sincerity,” Legacy (Volume 34, No. 1, 2017)

“The Life Itself: Quaker Women’s Diaries and the Secular Impulse,” Early American Literature 49 (2014) 1: 185-200.

“Cultivating Cultural Cohesion in Reuben and Rachel,” Studies in American Fiction 38 (Fall 2011 and Spring 2012) 1 & 2: 77-97.

"The Coquette and The Boarding School by Hannah Webster Foster." Edited by Jennifer Desiderio and Angela Vietto. Broadview Press, Summer 2011.