SUSAN SCHECKEL

Associate Professor
Undergraduate Program Director
Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley, 1992
American literature and culture in the U.S. before 1900; history of race in the U.S.; U.S. visual and popular print cultures before 1900; history of medicine before 1900; theories of nationalism
Humanities 2091
Susan.Scheckel@stonybrook.edu | 631-632-7411
I prefer to be contacted by email.

• Biography

  Biography

  Susan Scheckel earned her Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. After teaching at the University of Memphis and, briefly, at the University of Southern California, she came to Stony Brook in 2000.

• Selected Publications

  SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  Books and Edited Volumes:

  The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
  (Recipient of 1999 South Central Modern Language Association Book Award).

  Boundaries of Affect: Ethnicity and Emotion. E. Ann Kaplan and Susan Scheckel, eds. New York: Humanities Institute of Stony Brook Occasional Papers Series, 2007.

  Articles and Chapters:

  “‘To make something of the Indian’: Hampton Institute and the Uses of Popular Print Culture,” U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920. Ed. Christine Bold. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 417-36.

  “Home on the Train: Race and Mobility in The Life and Adventures of Nat Love,” American Literature 74:2 (June 2002), pp. 219-250.
  (2002 Don D. Walker Prize for best essay in Western American studies).

  "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest: Barker’s Pocahontas on the Popular Stage," ATQ 10:3 (September 1996), pp. 231-243.

  "'In the Land of His Fathers': Cooper, Land Rights and the Legitimation of American National Identity." James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts, Wil Verhoeven, ed. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993, pp. 125-150.

  "Mary Jemison and the Domestication of the American Frontier." Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier, Eric Heyne, ed. New York: Twayne, 1992, pp. 93-109.

• Current Research

  CURRENT RESEARCH

  I am currently completing a book titled "American Genealogies of Nostalgia," which traces the changing meanings of nostalgia in the United States, from its entry into the medical lexicon during the Revolution, through its accumulation of distinctive associations with race and gender, to its reappearance during the Civil War as a deadly disease of soldiers, and finally to its transformation after the war from a physiological condition to an affective state.

  I am also completing an article on Charles Chesnutt's engagement in the "Conjure Tales" with the scientific and medical discourse of the late nineteenth century.

• Courses Taught

  COURSES TAUGHT

  Undergraduate:

  EGL 204: Literary Analysis and Argumentation
  EGL 217: American Literature I
  EGL 218: American Literature II
  Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Visual Culture
  Civil War in American Literary and Visual Culture
  Dark Romantics: Hawthorne, Poe and Melville
  Mostly Melville
  EGL 399: Nineteenth-Century American Gothic Literature

  Masters:

  Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Visual Culture
  American Literature and Culture: Memory in the Nineteenth Century

  Ph.D. Seminars:

  Civil War in American Literary and Visual Culture
  Rethinking Early American Literary Studies
  Theorizing the Archive
  Romantic Atlantics
  Mind/Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

• Honors and Awards

  HONORS AND AWARDS

  NEH Summer Fellowship ($2,100), Summer 2012.

  Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring by a Faculty Member, 2009-2010.

  President’s and Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in Faculty Service, 2007-8.

  Commendation for Excellence in Service to Graduate Education by a GPD, Stony Brook, 2006.

  Rockefeller Foundation Grant for Residence in Bellagio, Italy, August 2004.

  Don D. Walker Prize for best essay published in Western American studies, 2003.

  South Central Modern Language Association Book Prize, 1999.

  Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Memphis, 1996