Additional Information / Informations supplémentaires

Office and Office Hour / Bureau et heure de réception
Seminar Pages / Pages de séminaire

Research Interests / Recherches

Deborah Madsen completed her undergraduate and Master's degrees in English at the University of Adelaide in South Australia; she was awarded a prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake doctoral studies at the University of Sussex in England. Before becoming Professor of American Literature and Culture at Geneva, she was Reader in English and Director of American Studies at the University of Leicester, then Professor of English at London South Bank University. She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Adelaide, Bern, Fribourg, and Cambridge.

Her research interests focus upon issues of modernity, national rhetoric, and cultural transnationalism; her approach is fundamentally historical and based on the exploration of rhetorical genealogies. She is the author of a series of books addressing the rhetoric of American national belonging (through allegory, through American Exceptionalism, through Postmodernism and Postcolonialism) and her current work uses theories of transnationalism to analyze patterns of dissent from the national rhetorical paradigm, in particular Native American histories and literatures of resistance. In press are Native Authenticity: Transatlantic Approaches to Native American Literature (ed. SUNY Press) and Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (co-ed. University of New Mexico Press). The monograph Contra Trauma: Reading Theory through Native American Literature (SUNY Press) is scheduled for publication in 2010. She is co-editor with Gerald Vizenor of the new SUNY Press book series "Native Traces" and the convener of the annual Geneva Native Studies Master Class.

For further information, consult: http://home.adm.unige.ch/~madsen/

Supervision

Deborah Madsen has supervised PhD theses on a variety of subjects ranging from poststructuralist critical theory to Chinese diaspora, African American and Native American literatures.

Proposals from prospective PhD students are invited in the following areas: literature and nationalism; cultural/psychoanalytic approaches to migration and transnationalism; Native American and comparative indigenous studies; gender theory and contemporary cultural body imagery. For further information, click here.

She has also supervised MA theses mostly in the area of American literary and cultural studies. Select titles of recent theses are: "Fantastical or Freakish? Questioning the Representation of 'Deviant' Bodies in Oz," "'Hegemonic' Masculinity and Gender Anxiety," "Gatsby's Schedule: The Myth of Benjamin Franklin's Self-Made Man," and "Audre Lorde: Anticipating Black Feminism." For further information about the Geneva MA, click here.

Publications

Selection of Books and Monographs / Sélection de livres et monographies

Understanding Gerald Vizenor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009).

co-ed. with Andrea Riemenschnitter, Diasporic Histories: Cultural Archives of Chinese Transnationalism (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009).

(ed.) Teaching, Technology and Textuality: Approaches to New Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

(ed.) Asian American Writers Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 312 (Detroit: Gale Group, 2005).

Feminist Theory and Literary Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Chinese edition, ed. Jin Li (Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2006).

American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh & London: Edinburgh University Press; Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1998).

Allegory in America: From Puritanism to Postmodernism , Studies in Literature and Religion Series (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).

Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).

The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon (London & Leicester: Leicester University Press; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991). Excerpts reprinted in Harold Bloom (ed.), Thomas Pynchon (New York: Chelsea House, 2003).

Selection of Articles / Selection d'articles

"Travels in the Body: Technologies of Waste in Chinese Diaspora," in China Abroad: Travel, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Elaine Yee Lin Ho & Julia Kuehn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009).

"On Subjectivity and Survivance: Rereading Trauma Through The Heirs of Columbus and The Crown of Columbus," in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 67-81.

"Thomas Pynchon and the Tradition of American Quest Romance," in Thomas Schaub (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works (New York: MLA, 2008), pp. 25-30.

“No Place Like Home: The Ambivalent Rhetoric of Hospitality in the Work of Simone Lazaroo, Arlene Chai, and Hsu-Ming Teo,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 27. 1-2 (Feb-May, 2006), pp. 117-32.

“Transcendence through Violence: Women and the Martial Arts Motif in Recent American Fiction and Film,” Essays and Studies, ed. David Seed (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), pp. 163-80. Italian translation by Federica Giardini, “Trascendenza e violenza. Donne e arti marziali nei film americani,” DWF: Donna woman femme, 82. 2 (2009), pp.18-24.

“Hawthorne’s Puritans: From Fact to Fiction,” Journal of American Studies, 33. 3 (1999), pp. 509-517.

“Family Legacies: Identifying the Traces of William Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Pynchon Notes, 42-43 (Spring-Fall, 1998), pp. 29-48.

“Using Hypercard to Teach Contemporary Critical and Cultural Theory,” in Randy Bass & Jeff Finlay (eds.), So What Can I Do With It: A Practical Guide for Using Technology in Teaching American Culture (American Studies Association, Crossroads Project).

“(Dis)figuration: The Body as Icon in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston,” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol.24 (1994), pp.237-50.

“The Sword or the Scroll: The Power of Rhetoric in Colonial New England,” American Studies, vol.33 no.1 (Spring 1992), pp.45-61. Winner of the 1993 Stone-Suderman Prize awarded by the Mid-America American Studies Association.

“‘A for Abolition’: Hawthorne’s Bond-servant and the Shadow of Slavery,” Journal of American Studies, vol.25 no.2 (August 1991), pp.255-59.

“The Romance of the New World,” Journal of American Studies, vol.24 no.1 (April 1990), pp.99-108.

”Hawthorne’s Post-Platonic Paradise: The Inversion of Allegory in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ “ The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol.18 no.2 (Spring 1988), pp.153-169.

“The Paradox of the Transcendental Trope: Intertextuality or the Allegory of Giles Goat-Boy,” Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays, vol.20 no.3 (November 1987), pp.240-257.