Professor of American Literature and Culture
University of Geneva
Deborah Madsen is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Geneva. Her work focuses on issues of settler-nationalism, indigeneity, and migration, exemplified by her work on American Exceptionalism, "UnAmerican
Exceptionalism," and the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny. Her most recent publications include the edited collections, Native Authenticity: Transatlantic Approaches to Native American Literature (SUNY Press 2010) and Louise Erdrich (Continuum, 2012). She is immediate past President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS), and currently serves on 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 of the Modern Language Association of America). She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Cape Town, Adelaide, and Cambridge, and is an honorary life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.She is
currently completing the monograph, Contra
Trauma: Reading Theory through Native American Culture, an
interdisciplinary critique of dominant white-settler paradigms of trauma that
fail to account for the specific historical experiences of indigenous peoples and,
as a consequence, inform failing models of social services (medical, judicial,
educational). This project brings together her earlier work in
poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist critical theory in a comparative
and interdisciplinary indigenous context.
She
has published extensively on Chinese immigration, particularly in relation to
Australia, Canada, and the United States, including the book Diasporic Histories: Archives of Chinese Transnationalism
(co-ed. Hong Kong University Press 2009). She has a pedagogical interest in e-learning
and has published widely on developments in this field.
For full details of her work: CURRICULUM
VITAE
Proposals from prospective PhD students are invited in
the following areas: literature and US nationalism; cultural approaches to
migration and transnationalism; Native American and comparative indigenous
studies; gender theory and contemporary cultural body imagery.
PUBLICATIONS
Full-texts of recent unpublished essays and
lectures
Sample chapters from published books
CURRENT COURSES
Mémoire (MA Thesis)and Graduate Supervision
PAST COURSES