Naomi Greyser is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and English. Greyser’s teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century U.S. literature; theory and practice of the rhetorical arts; the politics of affect; critical race, queer and feminist theory; and transnational American Studies.  Her publications include “Affective Geographies” (in American Literature).  From 2006-08, Greyser was Lecturer in the Women’s Studies Department at Iowa.  Previous to that, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in Stanford University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric and, before that, taught English at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

Teaching
As a teacher, Greyser aims to cultivate a learning community where we can reconsider what we think we know – about the art, power and limits of representation and about gender, race, class and nation.  Students learn to strategically intervene in an on-going conversation that matters to them by moving between careful rhetorical analysis, critical and theoretical discussions, and sensitivity to historical and political contexts.  She enjoys giving individual attention to students’ writing, thinking and talking with them about ways to make university work meaningful.  Students are always welcome to visit office hours and check in about ways to use her classes to help them meet their goals at the university.

Research
Greyser’s book project, On Sympathetic Grounds…,tracks relationships between sentimentalism’s spatial imagination - designed to involve subjects in imagining themselves in another’s shoes – and boundary re-configurations of regions, nations, communities and other forms of belonging in nineteenth-century North America.  It argues that sentimentalism developed belonging as a sense of having a place that was both emotional and territorial.  And it explores how, as it privileged social intimacy, sentimentalism lay groundwork for softer, gentler and more inclusive representations of social belonging as well as for a racialized and increasingly imperial culture of capital in what became the continental United States.

Other projects include an essay on disciplinary tensions in Feminist Studies.  “The Critical Territory of an Interdiscipline”argues that intersectional and transnational feminist methods productively unsettle any single, contiguous field space for the sake of locating anti-racist, anti-imperialist feminist politics across and between locations, scales and subject positions.   This essay is part of current research on conflicting enactments and representations of feminism across publics.  Selling Feminism will be a critical genealogy of iterations between popular (mis)conceptions of feminism and feminists’ own definitions and re-appropriations of the political.  It is especially concerned with contradictions emerging at the intersection of rights talk, local organizing, commodity culture, the arts, and the modern nation-state.