Teresa Zackodnik
Professor and Associate Chair, Graduate Studies
BA Saskatchewan, MA Waterloo, PhD McMaster
Professor
Supervisory and Research Interests
I am happy to supervise students working in American literature from the 19th century through to the present, and particularly those interested in African American literature and black cultural studies, Asian American fiction, and African American political movements, particularly black feminisms. My recent theoretical interests have been trauma theory, racial melancholia, public sphere theory, and I have an ongoing interest in theories of photography and critical race theory. I have supervised fascinating graduate work on: dress and identity in Asian American literature, the blues and jazz aesthetic in twentieth-century African American literature, black masculinity in slave and neo-slave narratives, primitivism and Harlem Renaissance texts, slave narratives and trauma theory, Native Canadian literatures of recovery, and the work of Toni Morrison.
Teaching
My undergraduate teaching has included courses on American modernism and postmodernism, race and belonging in American literature, Asian American literature, African American women’s writing, and minority American literatures. My graduate teaching has included courses such as, Visibility and African American Women, Asian American Texts and the Negotiation of Identity, Slavery and the African American Literary Imagination, U.S. “Blackness” and its Echoes, and Public Feminisms (with Susan Hamilton and Daphne Read).
Representative Publications
African American Feminisms 1828-1923. 6 volumes. Routledge: History of Feminisms Series, 2007.
The Mulatta and the Politics of Race. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004. 235 pages.
“’In another place not here’?: Feminist Black Nationalism and the Working Women’s Narratives of Dionne Brand’s No Burden to Carry,” No Language Is Neutral: Essays on the Work of Dionne Brand. Eds. Rinaldo Walcott, Dina Georgis, Katherine McKittrick.Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier P, 2010.
“Reaching Toward A Coalitional Feminism?: Anna Julia Cooper's 'Woman versus the Indian.'” Indigenous Women And Feminism: Culture, Activism, Politics. Eds. Jean Barman, Shari Hundorf, Jeanne Perault and Cheryl Suzack. Vancouver: UBC P, 2010.
“The ‘Green-Backs of Civilization’: Sojourner Truth and Portrait Photography.” American Studies 46.2 (Summer 2005):117-143.
“Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts and Racial Identity.” American Quarterly 53.3 (September 2001): 420-51.
“Suggestive Voices from the Storeroom of the Past: Photography and (Auto)biography in Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children” Essays on Canadian Writing 72 (2000):49-78.
Remarks
My interest in early black feminisms and public sphere theory has recently culminated in Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminisms in the Era of Reform, and I am now turning my mind to black feminist journalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.