Associate Professor of English
Ph.D. and M.A., University of Chicago
B.A., Yale University
007 B Sanborn House
Colleen.G.Boggs@Dartmouth.edu
As a scholar of American Literature, I investigate how language affects our understanding of individuals, nations and species. While most of my work focuses on the nineteenth century, I am also keenly interested in contemporary literary theory, gender and cultural studies.
Because I am a bilingual speaker of English and German, I have always been intrigued by the relationship between multilingualism and national identity. In my book, Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892 (Routledge, 2007), I ask how a work can be or become American absent a unifying mother tongue. Far from being a melting pot in which languages other than English vanish, the United States is now and has historically been an intensely multilingual country. Drawing on historical and contemporary language theory, I argue that the writers who founded American literature (such as Phillis Wheatley, James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe) embraced that multilingualism. They recognized that, to become “American,” a literary work had to be readily available in languages other than English. To circulate their works among the nation’s linguistically different readers, these writers actively promoted literary translation. Because such translation also allowed texts to be exported to other countries, it fulfilled these writers’ desire to create a “world literature” that reached beyond state boundaries. I argue that multilingualism is a hallmark of American literature, which we need to recognize as fundamentally and foundationally transnational.
The book I am currently researching – and for which I received a sabbatical fellowship from the American Philosophical Society, for a year-long leave in 2010 -- recovers the buried history of nineteenth century animal representations on which modern notions of individual and collective subjectivity are based. Animalia Americana: Animal Representation and the Construction of Modern Subjectivity works thematically in that it looks at textual depictions of domesticated animals. But what’s driving this project are theoretical questions regarding the relationship between animals and human beings, especially in regard to embodiment. By embodiment, I mean the social significance of physical attributes such as race and gender, and a range of physical experiences, such as pain, death, diet, growth, and nakedness. While my focus is on individual identity, I also ask how animal representations affect the collective, metaphorical body politic and American national identity. Case studies include Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, as well as Presidential pets, and the photos from Abu Ghraib.
“Emily Dickinson’s Animal Pedagogies.” PMLA, March 2009, 533-541.
“Introduction: (Un)Gendering the Transatlantic.” Symbiosis 13 (2), special issue edited by Colleen Glenney Boggs, October, 2009, 93-99.
Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.
“Translation in the United States.” Oxford History of Literary Translation in English:
Volume 4: 1790-1900 (5 vols). Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2006:20-33.
“Margaret Fuller’s American Translation.” American Literature 76 (1), March 2004:31-58.
“Specimens of Translation in Walt Whitman’s Poetry.” Arizona Quarterly 58 (3), Autumn 2002: 33-56.
Forthcoming Publications
“Bestialität und Folter.” Wahrheit und Gewalt: Der Diskurs der Folter. Ed. Thomas
Weitin. Stuttgart: Transcript Verlag, December, 2009.
“Rethinking Liberal Subjectivity: The Biopolitics of Animal Autobiography.” Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory. Eds. Marianne de Koven and Michael Lundblad. Columbia University Press. March 2010.
“Animals and the Formation of Liberal Subjectivity in Nineteenth Century American
Literature.” Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Ed. Russ Castronovo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
“American Bestiality: Sex, Animals and the Construction of Subjectivity.”
Cultural Critique, date TBA.
Sabbatical Year Fellowship, American Philosophical Society, 2009-10
Phi Beta Kappa, Yale University, Alpha Chapter, Connecticut
The Classical Tradition (Humanities 1/2), Food and Culture (Writing 5), Representing the Past: Fact and Fiction from “Waverley” to “Titanic”(English 7), Introduction to Literary Theory (English 15), American Poetry (English 40), American Prose (English 41), American Fiction to 1900 (English 42), Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature (English 62/ WGST 60), Whitman and Dickinson (English 66), The Civil War in American Literature (English 71), Foreign Affairs: The Translation of Cultures in Nineteenth Century American Literature (English 72), Whitman (English 72). I also teach a graduate seminar for the American Studies Summer Institute each year.
