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Jeffrey C. SwensonProgram: English Ph.D.
Began program in 2000
Area of Study: 19th and 20th Century American Literature & Culture, Native
American Literature
Office: 76 EPB
E-Mail: jeffrey-swenson@uiowa.edu
After completing my Master's Thesis at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks on F. Scott Fitzgerald's marriage fiction in 1997, I moved to Minneapolis where I taught American Literature and Composition at Brown College. Since beginning study at Iowa in 2000, much of my research has focused on Midwestern regionalism, and my dissertation research progresses from my study of place to a study of things--specifically the canoe as it is represented in American and Canadian literature. I argue that the canoe becomes a culturally contested object, being both authentically American Indian and appropriated by white authors. A study of authors ranging from Father Louis Hennepin to E. Pauline Johnson to Margaret Atwood reveals how authors convey and attempt to contain social and cultural anxieties, including race, gender and class dynamics, within the canoeing narrative.
The Small Town as Reflected in Midwestern Literature. The
Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume II. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Forthcoming.
Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads. The Dictionary of
Midwestern Literature, Volume II. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2005. Forthcoming.
In Good Company: The Midwestern Literary Community and the Short Fiction of Ruth
Suckow and Hamlin Garland. MidAmerica: The Yearbook of the
Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. Vol. 30 (2003). East Lansing: Midwestern Press. Winner
of the Midwestern Heritage Prize
8G:5/149:5 Literature of the Native American Peoples: "Rewriting the Indian Stereotype" (Fall 2004, Fall 2005)
8G:5/149:5 Literature of the Native American Peoples: "Native American
Literature Off the Rez" (Spring 2004)
8G:9 American Lives: "Sex, Murder and Mayhem in the Midwest" (Spring
2003)
8G:1 Interpretation of Literature (multiple courses)
American Literature
Association (ALA)
Modern Language Association (MLA)
Midwest Modern Language Association (M/MLA)
Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML)