Additional Information / Informations Supplémentaires

Office and Office Hour / Bureau et heure de réception

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 is devoted to the ways in which different expressions of narrative rhetoric respond to social and cultural crisis: American Exceptionalism, Feminism and Ecofeminism, race-based immigration, and settler colonialism in relation to Critical Indigenous Studies. She is currently Principal Investigator of the project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation entitled “Vegan Literary Studies: An American Textual History, c. 1776-1900” (www.unige.ch/vls) and she convenes an online international gathering of Vegan Studies scholars (https://www.unige.ch/vls/events/vls-webinar). Most of her publications are available in full-text from UNIGE's Open Access digital repository (https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/contributor/134908).

She has served as Associate Editor of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press), President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS), as a member of the Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of American Studies (published by Johns Hopkins University Press for the American Studies Association), and on the Editorial Advisory Committee of PMLA.

Publications

Selection of Books and Monographs / Sélection de livres et monographies

(co-ed.) Vegan Intersections: History, Literature, Theory. In progress.

(ed.) American Futures, American Futurisms. SPELL 46 (Heidelberg: Winter), in press.

(ed.) The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature (New York & London: Routledge, 2015).

(ed.) The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012).

(ed.) Louise Erdrich. Continuum Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction (London: Continuum, 2011).

(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 (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).

Recent Articles and Chapters / Sélection d'articles et de chapitres

“The Living and the Dead: Indigeneity, Trans-Species Kinship, and Resistance to Settler Capitalism.” In Routledge Handbook to Globalization and Literature. Ed. Kristian Shaw and Sara Upstone. Commissioned for August 2026.

“Animal Husbandry as Sexual Slavery: Ethical Vegan Intersections.” In Thinking Agriculture From the Margins: Intersectional Perspectives. Special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies. Ed. Dina Bolokan & Prisca Pfammatter. Commissioned for 15 December 2025.

“Of Bison Bones and Fine China: Indigenous Vegan Critique and ‘Animal Holocaust’ on the Great Plains.” In Vegan Intersections: History, Literature, Theory. Ed. Deborah Madsen and Ridvan Askin. Under submission.

“Allegorical Typology, Typological Allegory in American Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Allegory. Ed. David Parry. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), in press.

“From Angry Birds to Animikii: Survivance as Procedural Rhetoric in Elizabeth LaPensée's Thunderbird Strike.” Designs of Tomorrow: Indigenous Futurities in Literature and Culture. Ed. Birgit Daewes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), in press.

“Indigenizing the ‘Unnatural’ in Narratology, Normalizing the Indigenous ‘Natural’: Ojibwe Mimesis in Louise Erdrich's ‘The Stone’.” European Journal of American Studies, in press.

“Carnophallogocentrism and Vegan Narration: From Emotional to Moral Deixis in Alice Walker’s ‘Am I Blue?’” Part 1 in “What Judges Your Story? Moral Deixis and Readerly Orientation.” Who Tells Your Story? Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL) 42. Ed. Thomas Austenfeld & Aurélie Zurbruegg. Heidelberg: Winter, 2023. 139-58.

“Gerald Vizenor.” In Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature. Ed. Jackson Bryer. New York: Oxford University Press, 23 August 2022. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0101. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199827251/obo-9780199827251-0101.xml

with Bryn Skibo. “Indigenous Narratives.” In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Stephen Burn, Lesley Larkin & Patrick O'Donnell. New York & Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2022. 1-10. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119431732

“The Exceptional Power of the Dead in Heid Erdrich's National Monuments.” In Enduring Critical Poses: The Legacy and Life of Anishinaabe Literature and Letters. Ed. Gordon Henry Jr., Margaret Noodin, & David Stirrup. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. 149-75.

“Indigenizing the Internet.” In The Cambridge History of Native American Literature. Ed. Melanie B.Taylor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 481-500.

“Ambiguity.” In Thomas Pynchon in Context. Ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 298-306.

“Expanding Settler Colonial Theory.” Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought by Adam Dahl. Transmotion 5. 2 (2019). 92-105. Online. https://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/article/view/814

“'Communitism' in Aktion: Indigene Gemeinschaft, dekolonialer Aktivismus und Videospiel-Narrativ in Kisima Ingitchuna (Never Alone)” [“'Communitism' in Action: Indigenous Community, Decolonizing Activism, and Video Game Narrative in Kisima Ingitchuna (Never Alone)”] trans. Andreas Fliedner. In Subjektivität und Fremdheit in demokratischen Gemeinschaften: Beiträge am Schnittpunkt von Literatur und Politischer Philosophie [Subjectivity and Foreignness in Democratic Communities: Contributions on the Interface between Literature and Political Philosophy]. Ed. Michael Festl & Philipp Schweighauser. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2018. 257-83.

“Leslie Marmon Silko.” In Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature. Ed. Jackson Bryer. New York: Oxford University Press, 27 June 2018. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0174.  http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199827251/obo-9780199827251-0174.xml

“The Mechanics of Survivance in Indigenously-Determined Video-Games: Invaders and Never Alone.” Transmotion: A Journal of Indigenous Studies, 3.2 (2017): 79-110.

“Silko, Freud, and the Voicing of Disavowed Histories.” In Leslie Marmon Silko. Ed. David Moore. Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2016): 133-52.

“Discontinuous Narrative, Ojibwe Sovereignty, and the Wiindigoo Logic of Settler Colonialism: Louise Erdrich's Marn Wolde.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 28.3 (Fall 2016): 23-51.

“The Sovereignty of Transmotion in a State of Exception: Lessons from the Internment of 'Praying Indians' on Deer Island, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1675-1676.” Transmotion: A Journal of Indigenous Studies, 1. 1 (2015): 23-47. https://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/article/view/113/570

“Over Her Dead Body: Talking About Violence Against Women in Recent Chicana Writing.” In The Intimate and the Extimate: Violence and Gender in the Globalized World. Ed. Sanja Bahun-Radunovic and V.G. Julie Rajan, 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015. 255-69.

“The Contexts of Native. American. Literature.” In The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen. New York & London: Routledge, 2015). 1-12.