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, 2008.
- 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).