Maria Windell

Dr. Windell’s research and teaching emphasize ethnic and transnational US literatures and history. Her book, Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History (Oxford UP 2020), examines how writers of color and women writers used genre as a tool to navigate the racialized and gendered violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. Her current project uses nineteenth-century US naval writings as a connective thread to link the Middle East, Pacific, Caribbean, and US-Mexico borderlands. In so doing, it highlights US imperialism as a reactive force—one shaped by the decisions, actions, and sovereignties of Pacific Islanders, Caribbean pirates, Dominican and Mexican women, Muslim immigrants, and Tejano Confederates. Her work has appeared in journals including J19, Studies in American Fiction, and American Literary Realism, and she co-edited, with Jesse Alemán, a special issue of English Language Notes on “Latinx Lives in Hemispheric Context” (56.2).

Areas of Specialty

• American Literature
• Cultural Studies
• Ethnic American Literature, Literature of the Americas, Post Colonial Literature