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Department of English

Teresa A. Goddu

Professor of English and American Studies

Teresa A. Goddu is Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University and serves as Faculty Head of E. Bronson Ingram College. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Her research and teaching focus on slavery and antislavery, race and American culture, the history of the book, genre studies, as well as print, material and visual culture. She is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (Columbia University Press, 1997) and Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in American Literary History, Book History, MELUS, Common-Place, South Atlantic Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, and other venues. She is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Senior Specialist Fulbright award. 

Her new research focuses on the environmental humanities. She is writing a book-length study of contemporary climate fiction and she curates a climate fiction collection at the Vanderbilt library. As Director of the Program in American Studies, she designed and directed “The Sustainability Project,” a three-year interdisciplinary initiative to embolden Vanderbilt’s environmental efforts, which resulted in a minor in Environmental and Sustainability Studies. She was awarded The Chancellor’s Cup and named Alexander Heard Distinguished Service Professor for this work. She is the recipient of the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Humanities. 

Please click the link for the “Sustainability and Pedagogy” (MLA Session) website.

Representative publications

Books:

  • Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. (Columbia University Press, 1997).
  • Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16093.html

 

Recent Articles:

  • “The (Neo-) Slave Narrative and the Plantationocene.” African American Review, forthcoming.
  •  “Teaching Contemporary Climate Fiction,” in Teaching the Literature of Climate Change, ed. Debra J. Rosenthal. MLA,        forthcoming.
  •  “Homelessness in Lauren Groff’s Florida Fiction,” in Cli-Fi and Class, ed. Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason Molesky.     University of Virginia Press, forthcoming.
  • “U.S. Antislavery Tracts and the Literary Imagination.” The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature. Ed.  Ezra Tawil. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. 32-54.
  • “Antislavery’s Panoramic Perspective.” MELUS 39.2 (2014): 12-41. Special Issue on Visual Culture and Race edited by Shawn Michelle Smith. Recipient of the Katharine Newman MELUS Best Essay Award for 2014.
  • “The Slave Narrative as Material Text,” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, ed. John Ernest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 149–164.