Michelle Burnham specializes in early American literature, transoceanic early modern literature, Native American literature, and the novel. She is the author of Folded Selves: Colonial American Writing in the World System (2007) and Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1865 (1997). She is the editor of The Female American (2nd ed, 2014) and of A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson (2008). She is currently completing a book, The Revolutionary Pacific: Transoceanic American Writing and the Calculus of Risk.
Courses taught include early American literature, Native American literature, the novel, and popular culture.
Research Interests
- Early American Literature
- Native American Literature
- The Novel
- Critical Theory
Publications
- Books
- Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System (Hanover: UP of New England, 2007).
- Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. UP of New England, 1997.
- Editor, The Female American, by Unca Eliza Winkfield. Broadview, 2001.
- Editor, A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson. Heyday, 200
- Articles
- "Samuel Gorton and the Aesthetics of Colonial Dissent," in William and Mary Quarterly (2010).
"Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer as Indigenous Gothic," in Phantom Pasts, Phantom Presence, eds. Colleen Boyd and Coll Thrush (Nebraska, 2010).- "Textual Investments: Economics and Colonial American Writing," in Blackwell Companion to Colonial American Literatures, eds. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer (Blackwell, 2005).
- "The Periphery Within: Internal Colonialism and the Rhetoric of U.S. Nation Building," in Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies, eds. Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts (Rutgers, 2003).
- "Perpetual Emotion Machine," American Literary History (2002).
- "Pomo Basketweaving, Poison, and the Politics of Restoration in Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue," Studies in American Indian Literatures (2002).