Amanda J Zink
Amanda J. Zink
My research and teaching focus on nineteenth to twenty-first century American literature. More particularly, my work focuses on American literature from the margins, written by Americans who, because of their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or indigeneity, find themselves struggling even to be included in the American body politic. I also focus on literature from generic margins, writing and teaching about texts such as magazine stories, comics, and other ephemeral cultural texts alongside more traditionally “literary” novels, poems, short stories, and essays.
My first book emerging from these interests was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2018. Titled Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850-1950, this book looks at the (literary) history of women’s involvement in Westward Expansion. As white women found new freedoms during this period, American Indian and Mexican American women found themselves doubly colonized: by the federal projects and programs that took over more and more Western lands, but also by a newly-mobile force of white women who used their authority in the ideologies of American domesticity to force new ways of living and being upon them. At the same time, Indian and Mexican women also found ways into this domestic discourse, and their literature demonstrates sophisticated negotiations of the forces—both indigenous and federal—that would circumscribe their identities.
I am also at work on a second book project, under contract with TTU Press to be published in late 2023. The research for my first book shows that a) there are many, many texts written by Native American students during their years at federal Indian boarding schools and that b) these texts, though increasingly digitized, are scattered across the Internet and library archives. This second book, then, gathers some of these texts into an edited collection, an anthology of writings on various topics written by Native students between 1900 and 1930 at the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon. The anthology includes pieces by almost 250 students along with biographies of each of them. Such a book will provide easier access—for researchers and Indigenous families—to a nearly forgotten canon of Native writing that is a rich site documenting the adaptation and survivance (to use Gerald Vizenor’s term) of American Indians during the heyday of federal policies aimed at exterminating them.
Publications:
“Syncretic Modernism and The Chemawa American.” The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms. Eds. Kirby Brown, Stephen Ross, Alana Sayers. Routledge, 2022.
Co-Authored with Elizabeth Olaoye. “The Muslim Woman’s Body as a Speakerly Text: The Gendered Embodiment of Religion, Trauma and Shame in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim Seasons of Crimson Blossoms.” The Body Studies Journal. June 2020. http://bodystudiesjournal.org/season-of-crimson-blossoms/
“‘In harmony with the desert’: Syncretic Modernism in Polingaysi Qoyawayma’s No Turning Back.” Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement. Lexington, March 2019.
Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850-1950, University of New Mexico Press, June 2018.
“Carlisle's Writing Circle: Boarding School Texts and the Decolonization of Domesticity.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 27. 4 (Winter 2015), 37-65.
"Maternal Economies in the Estranged Sisterhood of Edith Summers Kelley and Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Studies in American Fiction. Forthcoming, Spring 2015.
"Peyote in the Kitchen: Gendered Identities and Imperial Domesticity in Edna Ferber's Cimarron." Western American Literature 47.1 (Spring 2012): 67-89.
Courses Taught:
ENGL 6625: Graduate Seminar in Post-1800 Literature: Asian American Literature in the American West
ENGL 6623: Graduate Seminar in Literary Themes (Setting Up Housekeeping: Literary Domesticity in the American West, Fall 2014 and (Re)Narrating Anxiety and Identity in American Literature and Pop Culture, Spring 2017)
ENGL 6611: Theories at the Intersection(ality)
ENGL 4491: Senior Seminar in Literature, Borderlands: Mexican American Literature
ENGL 4470/5570: Post-Colonial Literature
ENGL 4468/5568: Studies in Early 20th Century: American Modernisms
ENGL 4453/5553: American Indian Literatures
ENGL 4433: Methods of Teaching English
ENGL 3356: Ethnicity in Literature
ENGL 3353: The West in American Literature
ENGL 3328: Gender in Literature
ENGL 3323: Genre Studies in Fiction: American Westerns
ENGL 3311: Literary Criticism and Theory
ENGL 2211: Introduction to Literary Analysis
ENGL 1175: Literature and Ideas: American Horror Stories
ENGL 1126: The Art of Film
ENGL 1102: Writing and Rhetoric II
ENGL 1101: Writing and Rhetoric I
Address: Pocatello, Idaho, United States
My research and teaching focus on nineteenth to twenty-first century American literature. More particularly, my work focuses on American literature from the margins, written by Americans who, because of their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or indigeneity, find themselves struggling even to be included in the American body politic. I also focus on literature from generic margins, writing and teaching about texts such as magazine stories, comics, and other ephemeral cultural texts alongside more traditionally “literary” novels, poems, short stories, and essays.
My first book emerging from these interests was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2018. Titled Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850-1950, this book looks at the (literary) history of women’s involvement in Westward Expansion. As white women found new freedoms during this period, American Indian and Mexican American women found themselves doubly colonized: by the federal projects and programs that took over more and more Western lands, but also by a newly-mobile force of white women who used their authority in the ideologies of American domesticity to force new ways of living and being upon them. At the same time, Indian and Mexican women also found ways into this domestic discourse, and their literature demonstrates sophisticated negotiations of the forces—both indigenous and federal—that would circumscribe their identities.
I am also at work on a second book project, under contract with TTU Press to be published in late 2023. The research for my first book shows that a) there are many, many texts written by Native American students during their years at federal Indian boarding schools and that b) these texts, though increasingly digitized, are scattered across the Internet and library archives. This second book, then, gathers some of these texts into an edited collection, an anthology of writings on various topics written by Native students between 1900 and 1930 at the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon. The anthology includes pieces by almost 250 students along with biographies of each of them. Such a book will provide easier access—for researchers and Indigenous families—to a nearly forgotten canon of Native writing that is a rich site documenting the adaptation and survivance (to use Gerald Vizenor’s term) of American Indians during the heyday of federal policies aimed at exterminating them.
Publications:
“Syncretic Modernism and The Chemawa American.” The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms. Eds. Kirby Brown, Stephen Ross, Alana Sayers. Routledge, 2022.
Co-Authored with Elizabeth Olaoye. “The Muslim Woman’s Body as a Speakerly Text: The Gendered Embodiment of Religion, Trauma and Shame in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim Seasons of Crimson Blossoms.” The Body Studies Journal. June 2020. http://bodystudiesjournal.org/season-of-crimson-blossoms/
“‘In harmony with the desert’: Syncretic Modernism in Polingaysi Qoyawayma’s No Turning Back.” Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement. Lexington, March 2019.
Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850-1950, University of New Mexico Press, June 2018.
“Carlisle's Writing Circle: Boarding School Texts and the Decolonization of Domesticity.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 27. 4 (Winter 2015), 37-65.
"Maternal Economies in the Estranged Sisterhood of Edith Summers Kelley and Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Studies in American Fiction. Forthcoming, Spring 2015.
"Peyote in the Kitchen: Gendered Identities and Imperial Domesticity in Edna Ferber's Cimarron." Western American Literature 47.1 (Spring 2012): 67-89.
Courses Taught:
ENGL 6625: Graduate Seminar in Post-1800 Literature: Asian American Literature in the American West
ENGL 6623: Graduate Seminar in Literary Themes (Setting Up Housekeeping: Literary Domesticity in the American West, Fall 2014 and (Re)Narrating Anxiety and Identity in American Literature and Pop Culture, Spring 2017)
ENGL 6611: Theories at the Intersection(ality)
ENGL 4491: Senior Seminar in Literature, Borderlands: Mexican American Literature
ENGL 4470/5570: Post-Colonial Literature
ENGL 4468/5568: Studies in Early 20th Century: American Modernisms
ENGL 4453/5553: American Indian Literatures
ENGL 4433: Methods of Teaching English
ENGL 3356: Ethnicity in Literature
ENGL 3353: The West in American Literature
ENGL 3328: Gender in Literature
ENGL 3323: Genre Studies in Fiction: American Westerns
ENGL 3311: Literary Criticism and Theory
ENGL 2211: Introduction to Literary Analysis
ENGL 1175: Literature and Ideas: American Horror Stories
ENGL 1126: The Art of Film
ENGL 1102: Writing and Rhetoric II
ENGL 1101: Writing and Rhetoric I
Address: Pocatello, Idaho, United States
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