The seeds of my current interest in American literature were initially planted many years ago when, as an American expatriate in London, I became acutely aware of the “American experience” as distinctive and unique. As a scholar of American literature, I am particularly interested in nineteenth-century American women writers and the American West because the study of these writers allows me to explore the ways that women’s expectations and their distinct rhetorical voice in the form of mid-nineteenth-century sentimental fiction were adapted to the western environment. My work has also led me to consider the role of authenticity in women’s depictions of their experience of the American West.

As a graduate of the Literature and Environment program at the University of Nevada, Reno, I find myself increasingly interested in the intersections of nature and culture and how this is represented in literature. My scholarship on western women’s narrative originated in my interest in ecocriticism and environmental literature.

Selected Publications

Across the Plains: Sarah Royce's Western Narrative. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009.

“‘These is my words’ . . . or are they?: Constructing Western Women’s Lives in Two Contemporary Novels,” Great Plains Quarterly. 26 (Winter 2006): 13-25.

“What Passes Away: Visions of Time in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours,” in Susan Fenimore Cooper: New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, eds. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. 154-168.

Courses Taught

• American Literature Survey I
• Gender in Literature
• Nineteenth-Century Literature
• Technical Writing

Office: LA 236
Office Phone: 282-2531
adkijenn@isu.edu