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Martha Elena Rojas
Assistant Professor of American Literature
Rumowicz Literature of the Sea Lecture/Seminar Series, Co-Director
Ph.D. Stanford University
B.A. Harvard University
Office: 308D Independence Hall
Phone: 401-874-7880
Email: marty@uri.edu
Office Hours:
Tues/Thur
1:00 - 2
:00 pm
Professor Rojas joined the English department at the University of Rhode Island in the fall of 2005. Previously, she has taught at Stanford University, at the University of Pennsylvania while a dissertation fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and most recently at Sweet Briar College where she held an appointment as the Honors Post-Doctoral Fellow. While teaching eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, her courses have explored the anxieties occasioned by concepts of originality, authenticity, value and representation in a culture that celebrates self-fashioning, lauds honor and exemplary masculinity, and is preoccupied with crime and seduction. Recent courses have included Self-Control & Self-Improvement: Narratives of Reform in U.S. Literature; At Sea: Ocean Voyages & the Literary Imagination; Faking It: Impostors & Counterfeits in U.S. Literature; Traditions of the Novel in the Americas, and seminars on the American Enlightenment.
Her ongoing intellectual interests include the problem of compromise in early America, pan-American cultural and political movements, maritime literature, and tales of rogues, tricksters, and go-betweens. While at Stanford, she was awarded the Alden Dissertation Prize for “Diplomatic Letters: The Conduct and Culture of Foreign Affairs in the Early Republic.” Her current book manuscript is a revision of this project and takes up issues of improvisation and representation as the United States strove to mold itself into a nation among nations. The manuscript explores a series of exchanges — of texts, bodies, objects, or pleasantries — that obeyed protocol and courted favor, and examines an array of cultural and literary materials: including diplomatic letters and gifts, treaties of peace and friendship, political pamphlets, private journals, narratives of captivity. A section from this project, on the “Barbary” captivity of the American sailor, James Leander Cathcart, has appeared in Early American Studies. And another essay, “Diplomatic Exchanges: Gifts, Bribes and Tribute,” is forthcoming in a volume titled The Old World and the New: Exchanges Between America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson.
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