Martha Cutter
Professor, English and Director of American Studies
Martha J. Cutter is Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches classes in African American literature and post- Civil War American Literature. From 2006-2014 she was the editor-in-chief of MELUS: Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States and before that was the senior editor of Legacy: A Journal on American Women Writers for two years. Her first book, Unruly Tongue: Language and Identity in American Women’s Writing (University Press of Mississippi, 1999) won the 2001 Nancy Dasher Award from the College English Association. Her second book, Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity, was published in 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. Her third book, The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1852 was recently published by the University of Georgia Press.
She also has over thirty-five articles and book chapters, which have appeared in journals such as American Literature, African American Literature, Callaloo, Women’s Studies, Studies in American Literary Realism, CEA Critic, Arizona Quarterly, MELUS, Legacy, and Criticism, and in the collections Mixed Race Literature (Stanford UP, 2002), Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Duke UP, 1996), and Passing in the Works of Charles Chesnutt (University of Mississippi Press 2009). She is currently at work on a study of the passing narrative in US history and literature and on another on the spectacular visual culture of slavery.
