Native American Studies: Faculty

Name: Melanie Benson (Herring Pond Wampanoag)

Title: Assistant Professor of English and Native American Studies

Education: Ph.D., Boston University, 2005; M.A., Boston University, 1999; B.A., Smith College, 1998

Courses Taught: NAS 7, NAS 30, NAS 35

Melanie Benson is a literary and cultural studies scholar of Herring Pond Wampanoag descent. Growing up in a working-class community on Cape Cod fueled her interest in the collision of economics and identity formation in the United States. Her work explores the effects of capitalist and colonialist logic on the lives, language, and cultural productions of marginalized peoples throughout the Americas. Her first book, Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002 (University of Georgia Press, 2008), examines the 20^th century South’s enduring capitalist trauma, begun under slavery and echoed in the modern free market. In this work, she calls attention to the Southeast’s surviving Native Americans, many of whom resisted removal in the 1830s and yet remain largely invisible in a region dominated by biracial, post-slavery struggles. As a member of the Executive Council of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) and a co-editor of the H-Southern Literature listserv, she helps to facilitate more frequent and productive intersections between Native American and Southern Studies. Currently, she is at work on two new book projects: Reconstructing the Native South examines overlooked Native American literature in the contemporary Southeast, and A Beautiful Nothing takes a broader look at the discursive and corporeal effects of American capitalism nationwide. Additionally, she is conducting research on Plains Indian ledger drawings as frustrated attempts to overwrite and subvert colonial-capitalist paradigms and materials. While much of her work and courses focus on postcolonial and postmodern change and trauma, she also emphasizes the power of cultural survival. As a student of Wôpanâak, a revitalized dialect in the Algonquian language family, she is committed to supporting Native language reclamation efforts nationwide.