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Windell, Maria A.

Associate Professor

Positions

Research Areas research areas

Research

research overview

  • 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

Publications

selected publications

Teaching

courses taught

  • ENGL 1320 - The Short Story
    Primary Instructor - 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
    Primary Instructor - 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
    Primary Instructor - 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
    Primary Instructor - 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
    Primary Instructor - 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.
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Background

International Activities

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