Name: Melanie Benson Taylor (Herring Pond Wampanoag)
Title: Associate Professor of Native American Studies
Education: Ph.D., Boston University, 2005; M.A., Boston University, 1999; B.A., Smith College, 1998
Courses Taught: NAS 7, NAS 32, NAS 35
Melanie Benson Taylor is a literary critic who specializes in U.S. Southern studies. She explored the intersections of Native, African American, white, and immigrant southern cultures in her first two books: Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002 (2008) and Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (2012). She continues to examine the effects of economic anxiety on the construction of cultural identity and borders in two new books projects:Faulkner's Doom interrogates the use of Indian tropes in William Faulkner's modern South, and Indian Killers uncovers the phenomenon of violence and murder in texts by and about contemporary Native Americans.
