Kalter, Susan.  Cultures of Imperialism and Resistance:  the Louisiana Territory in Literature.  A serial exploration of the multinational, multilingual literature and history of the Louisiana territory, investigating British, French, Indian-nations, Spanish, and U.S. narratives of the region.

Hsu, Hsuan and Susan Kalter, eds.  A joint edition of “The Man Without a Country” (1863) and Philip Nolan’s Friends (1876) by Edward Everett Hale.

Books

Kalter, Susan, ed.  Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations:  The Treaties of 1736-62.  Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Brown, Barry, Christopher Conway, Rhett Gambol, Susan Kalter, Laura Ruberto, Tomas Taraborrelli, and Donald Wesling, eds. Bakhtin and the Nation issue. Bucknell Review 43.2 (1999).

Articles

Kalter, Susan.  “Clothing The Prairie in Furs:  The International Trade Contexts of Cooper’s Western Novel.”  Western American Literature.  Forthcoming.

Kalter, Susan.  “John Joseph Mathews’ Reverse Ethnography:  The Literary Dimensions of Wah’Kon-Tah.”  Reprint in Native American Writing:  Critical Assessments.  Forthcoming.  2008.  United Kingdom.

Kalter, Susan.  “Finding a Place for David Cusick in Native American Literary History.”  MELUS:  The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 27.3 (Fall 2002):  9-42.

Kalter, Susan.  “A Student of Savage Thought:  The Ecological Ethic in Moby-Dick and Its Grounding in Native American Ideologies.”  ESQ:  A Journal of the American Renaissance 48.1-2 (1st and 2nd Quarters 2002):  1-40.

Kalter, Susan.  “John Joseph Mathews’ Reverse Ethnography:  The Literary Dimensions of Wah’Kon-Tah.”  SAIL 14.1 (Spring 2002):  26-50.

Kalter, Susan.  “ ‘America’s Histories’ Revisited:  The Case of Tell Them They Lie.”  American Indian Quarterly 25.3 (Summer 2001):  329-351.

Kalter, Susan. “ ‘Chickamauga’ as an Indian-Wars Narrative: The Relevance of Ambrose Bierce for a First-Nations-Centered Study of the Nineteenth Century.”  Arizona Quarterly 56.4. (Winter 2001):  57-82.

Kalter, Susan, Laura Ruberto, Tomas Taraborrelli, and Donald Wesling. Introduction. Bakhtin and the Nation issue. Bucknell Review 43.2 (1999).

Kalter, Susan. “The Last of the Mohicans as Contemporary Theory: James Fenimore Cooper’s Philosophy of Language.”  James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers 11. (August 1999): 1-14.

Kalter, Susan. “The Path to Endless: Gary Snyder in the mid-1990s.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41.1 (Spring 1999): 16-46.

Miscellaneous

Kalter, Susan.  “John Joseph Mathews (Osage) (1894-1979)” Headnote for the work of Mathews in The Thomson Anthology of American Literature, Volume IV, 1910-1945.  Forthcoming.

 

“Philip Nolan’s Friends and the Dual Duel:  Edward Everett Hale’s uses of the Spanish and English national literary traditions in his novel of the U.S.-Mexico border.”  American Studies Association.  Philadelphia.  October 2007.  Panel organizer:  “Anglo-Spanish rivalries and the U.S.-Mexican border.”

 

“Key Topics around Edward Everett Hale’s Philip Nolan’s Friends”  Hale House Museum Planning Conference.  Sponsored by the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society.  Matunuck, Rhode Island.  19 July 2007.

 

“Post-colonial theory and theory for the study of ethnic and international discourses, with a focus on Native American Studies theory.”  Invited talk, Theory Night, English Studies Association, Illinois State University.  21 March 2007.

 

“Clothing The Prairie in Furs:  The International Trade Contexts of Cooper’s Western Novel.”  James Fenimore Cooper Society Panel.  The Seventeenth Annual American Literature Association Conference. San Francisco.  25 May 2006.

 

“Chasing Horses in Comanchería:  How Hale naturalizes U.S. conquest in Philip Nolan’s Friends.”  The Thirty-Ninth Annual Western Literature Association Conference.  Big Sky, Montana.  1 October 2004.

“Yukon storytellers and the teaching of Jack London within a comparative literary history of the Arctic.”  Jack London Society Symposium.  Lihue, Hawaii.  11 October 2002.

“Mutiny, Whiteness, and the Neutral Word:  Rethinking Ambiguity in Moby-Dick through Voloshinov’s Philosophy of Language.”  The International Melville Conference:  Moby-Dick 2001, An Interdisciplinary Celebration.  Hempstead, New York.  18 October 2001.

“Reading Helen Hunt Jackson:  The Achievement of A Century of Dishonor and its importance for interpreting Ramona.”  The Western Literature Association Panel.  The Tenth Annual Conference of the American Literature Association.  Cambridge.  24 May 2001.

“A Strategy of Import: The Verbal Ventriloquism of London’s Yukon Fiction.” London Society Symposium. Santa Rosa, California. 14 October 2000.

“Ecology and Anti-Savagism at Mid-Century: Melville’s uses of Native American thought in Moby-Dick.” The Melville Society panel. The One Hundred Fifteenth Convention of the Modern Language Association of America. Newberry Library, Chicago. 28 December 1999.

“‘Chickamauga’ as an Indian-Wars Narrative: The Relevance of Ambrose Bierce for a First-Nations-Centered Study of the Nineteenth Century.” The Thirty-Fourth Annual Western Literature Association Conference. Sacramento, California. 14 October 1999. Nominated for the J. Golden Taylor Award for best graduate student paper.

“Dancing with a ghost, guarding the burial-ground: The Bakhtinian Critique of Linguistics and the Voices Beyond the American Grave.” The Ninth International Conference on Mikhail Bakhtin. Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany. 26 July 1999.  Delivered in absentia.

“The Last of the Mohicans as Contemporary Theory: James Fenimore Cooper’s Philosophy of Language.” James Fenimore Cooper Society panel. The Eighth Annual Conference of the American Literature Association. Baltimore. 28 May 1999.

“On the Brink of Extinction: The anti-savagist discourse of Moby-Dick.” The 1999 meeting of the California American Studies Association: On Edge. University of California, Santa Cruz. 30 April 1999.

“‘Parlez-vous Indien, Monsieur Edwards?’: Language and Literature from the Atlantic to the Meschasebé before and after the Errand.” Association for the Study of American Indian Literature panel. The Seventh Annual Conference of the American Literature Association. San Diego. 30 May 1998.

“Speech Genres and Their Role in Dialogues with and about Native Americans.” The Eighth International Conference on Mikhail Bakhtin. The University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta. 22 June 1997.

“The Making of Realism through Difference: The Turn-of-the-Century Haitian Novel in National and International Perspective.” Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. 11 April 1997. Nominated for the Horst Frenz Prize for best graduate student paper.

“Paring down theory for undergraduates” as part of the Ford Foundation workshop called “Teaching Diversity at the University” on adapting the Dimensions of Culture program for area colleges. University of California, San Diego. 8 June 1996.

“Identifying speech genres in contemporary fiction” as part of “Working with Bakhtin” in the Department of Literature Colloquium. University of California, San Diego. 24 October 1995.

 

Maciel, Carla.  “Bantu Oral Narratives in the Training of EFL Teachers in Mozambique.” 2006. Co-director.

Kima, Raogo.  “Feminist Intersections:  Reading Louise Erdrich and Buchi Emecheta Within/Across Cultural Boundaries.” 2006. Second reader.

 

Early borderlands studies in North America; The relationship between official histories and narrative; The recovery of texts by Native Americans and/or relevant to Native American studies; The United States’ literary relationship to the First Nations, their citizens, and their intellectual sovereignty; Historical intercourse and antagonisms between agents of western writing and orality/nonwestern writing; Pedagogy and critical multiculturalisms in higher education and secondary schools; The recovery of texts from Haitian literary history and the French-speaking Americas; Individualism and collectivism in the American imagination; Egalitarianism; Herman Melville; The study of North American languages and its influence on literary activity and aesthetic theory; Native American writers and artists; Bakhtin studies. 

Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Literature; Early American Literature; U. S.-First Nations Relations in Literary and Cultural Works; Americas Cultural Studies; Critical Multiculturalisms; Ancient, Gothic, and Postmodern Prose; Power Relations and Sociological & Cultural Materialist Dialogism; The Role of Literary and Cultural Studies in Land Claims Politics; Literature of Ecology and the Wilderness; Regionalism; Socialisms and Literature; Women and War; Native American Writers; Iroquois Orature and Literature; Caribbean Literature in English and Translation; Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature from Quebec; Twentieth Century African Writers; Irish Cultural Heritage and Anti-Imperialism; Resistances against Coercive or non-Dialogic Christian Conversion by Native Americans, Africans, Asians, European Pagan-Heathens, Polytheists, Jews, and others; Religious and Cultural Syncretism.

"Keep these words until the stones melt: Language, ecology, war, and the written land in nineteenth century U.S.-Indian relations." This study examines how U.S. writers, Western linguistic theorists, and members of Indian nations rely on or borrow from intellectual centers of thought that preceded and survived European presence on the North American continent. These uses of Native American thought, by writers such as Cooper, Melville, Bierce, Jewett, Hunt Jackson, and London, emerged in arenas dominated by the discourse of savagism. Savagism had developed in European settler communities in reaction to cultural difference and to rationalize encroachment on Indian lands. The belief that Native Americans would either become civilized or become extinct pervaded these communities. Comparing these authors’ works to indigenous verbal artistry recorded from within six Indian nations or groups of nations—the Iroquois, Lenni Lenape, Cherokee, Plains and Basin groups, and Dene—I argue that savagism did not constitute an impervious master narrative. My research reveals narratives that ran counter to this dominant narrative—what I call anti-savagism and ante-savagism—and examines how all these narratives based themselves in the Indian word.

Committee: Michael Davidson and Donald Wesling (chairs), Jaime Concha, Ross Frank, Shelley Streeby, Winifred Woodhull

 

Literature and Culture of the Americas 
• Manifest Domesticity (audited sessions), Nicole Tonkovich
• The 1950s: Culture of Containment, Michael Davidson
• American Studies and the Politics of Location, Shelley Streeby
• Unreal Cities: Urbanism and Modernity (audited), Michael Davidson
• Nineteenth Century American Studies: Natives and Aliens, Shelley Streeby
• Methodology Studies: Reading Practice (audited), Donald Wesling
• Genre Studies: Landscape Poetry East and West, Wai-Lim Yip
• Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Michael Davidson

• La littérature antillaise de langue française, Winifred Woodhull
• Le Roman Québécois, Catherine Ploye
• Themes in French Intellectual and Literary History (audited), Louis Morhange

• Contemporary Issues in the Literature of Columbia and Chile, Jaime Concha
• Latin America from 1945 to 1995, Jaime Concha
• La Literatura del Caribe (audited), Maria Zeilina

Literary Theory
• History of European Criticism and Aesthetics:
        Renaissance to Enlightenment, Oumelbanine Zhiri
• History of European Criticism and Aesthetics:
        Kant to the Twentieth Century, Steven Cassedy
• Text/Culture/Critical Practice, Todd Kontje
• Introduction to Sexuality and Gender Studies, Judith Halberstam
• Cultural Perspectives and Criticism, Lisa Lowe
• Theories of Literary Criticism: Working with Bakhtin, Donald Wesling

 

• Western Civilization
• Poetry and poetics, Adrienne Rich
• Shakespeare
• The Role of the Military in Politics, Condoleeza Rice
• International Politics, Stephen Krasner
• History of the English Language
• The Modern Middle East, Joel Beinin
• Dostoevsky and French Literature, Joseph Frank
• Virginia Woolf, Lucio Ruotolo
• Southern Africa, David Abernethy
• African and African American Women Writers, Biodun Jeyifo (Cornell University)
• Irish Literature (Cornell University)
• Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff
• The Caribbean-Americas, Sylvia Wynter
• Playwriting, Adrienne Kennedy
• Kiowa Photography Project, Linda Poolaw
• Contemporary British Drama (St. Catherine's College, Stanford-in-Oxford)
• British Foreign Policy and International Relations (Stanford-in-Oxford)
• Kenyan and Nigerian Literature, Anthony Kirk-Greene (St. Antony’s College, Stanford-in-Oxford)
• Theory of the (Post)Modern Novel (Merton College, Stanford-in-Oxford)
• Romantic Poetry, Jonathan Wordsworth (St. Catherine's College, Stanford-in-Oxford)
• History of the British Empire (Stanford-in-Oxford)
• Chinese Poetry, Steven Van Zoeren
• English Literature to the Renaissance, Seth Lerer
• Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Terry Castle
• Contemporary Francophone Literature from Africa and the Caribbean, J.-M. Apostolides
• American Fiction from Romance to Realism, David Halliburton
• American Drama from 1920-1970, Harry Elam
• Reading and Writing Poetry
• Honors Thesis, Diane Middlebrook and Priscilla Wald

 

National

Summer 2002:  Summer Stipend, National Endowment for the Humanities

Illinois State University

2004-05:  Nominee for the Research Initiative Award, Department of English

2003-04:  Nominee for the Research Initiative Award, College of Arts and Sciences

2003-04:  Nominee for the Research Initiative Award, Department of English

Summer 2002:  Pre-Tenure Faculty Initiative Grant

Summer 2001:  New Faculty Initiative Grant

University of California, San Diego

Winter 1999: Dissertation Fellowship, Department of Literature

1998-99 Senior Teaching Assistant, Department of Literature.  To orient and mentor new teaching assistants.

 

American Literature Association
American Studies Association
Association for the Study of American Indian Literature
The Melville Society
Modern Language Association
Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States
Western Literature Association

 

Languages

French—Fluent
Spanish—Read, translate, and interpret with competence
Cherokee and Mohawk—Beginning