Department of English
James B. Salazar
James Salazar’s research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, race and gender studies, political cultures of the U.S., childhood, rhetorical theory, and critical theory. His work on the topics of politics of race and literary genre, feminist approaches to late nineteenth century urban reform, and cosmopolitanism and empire in nineteenth-century U.S. literature has appeared in the journals American Quarterly, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and Social Semiotics, and in Our Sister’s Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women, edited by Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi. His first book, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America, was published by New York University Press as part of its new series “America and the Long 19th Century,” which is edited by David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald and sponsored by the Mellon Foundation’s American Literatures Initiative. He is currently working on a new book project, provisionally titled Captivating Arabia: Echoes of the Barbary Captivity Narrative in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. This project examines the Barbary captivity narratives published by Americans captured and enslaved by North African “pirates” in the early nineteenth century and the role they played in the development of national culture and literary aesthetics in the United States.
Recent courses include: Transnational American Studies, The Nineteenth-Century Child, Fetishism and the Imagination, Narratives of Empire, Speculative Fiction in Nineteenth Century America, American Romanticism, and The Gilded Age.
He is currently serving as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English.