Colleen Glenney Boggs
Professor
Appointments
Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities
Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities
Professor of English
Area of Expertise
19th-century American literature and culture,
Civil War literature,
animal studies,
transnationalism and transatlantic studies,
translation theory,
literary theory
Biography
Colleen Glenney Boggs is the Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities. A scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, she has particular expertise in the literatures of the American Civil War, animal studies, transatlantic studies, and literary theory. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Mellon Foundation, she is the author of Patriotism By Proxy: The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of Citizen-Soldiers, 1863-1865 (Oxford University Press, 2020), Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892 (Routledge, 2007; paperback 2009). Her work has appeared in American Literature, PMLA, Cultural Critique, and J19, among others. She edited the volume Options for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War (Modern Language Association, 2016). Together with Laura Doyle (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Maria Cristina Fumagalli (University of Essex), she co-edited the book series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures from 2013-23. She has served on the PMLA Editorial Board and the MLA Publications Committee, and as Director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities, where she developed an initiative in "medical humanities" that was the recipient of a CHCI/ Mellon Foundation research grant. Together with Professor Jennifer Lind (Government Department), she launched Dartmouth's Public Voices Program. A bilingual speaker of English and German, Professor Boggs has presented her work broadly in national and international venues, including plenary lectures in Heidelberg, Bamberg, Leeds, Montréal, Nuremberg, Oslo, Stockholm, Uppsala, and as Distinguished Professor at the Center for American Studies in Rome. She serves as co-director for Dartmouth's Summer Institute in American Studies. In 2019, she was elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society. During the pandemic, she created a website with colleagues and students that took the pandemic's impositions of domesticity as an opportunity to look anew at the home as a site of constraint and creativity in the 19th Century. Her current research examines how modernist authors such as Richard Wright and Alice B. Toklas experimented with "lifestyle" writing.
Education
B.A. Yale University
M.A. University of Chicago
Ph.D. University of Chicago
Taught Courses
Publications
Patriotism by Proxy: The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of Citizen-Soldiers, 1863-1865 (Oxford University Press, 2020)
"Introduction to 'Poetics of Fact, Politics of Fact'" -- a "theories and methodologies" essay cluster co-edited with Chenxi Tang (Berkeley), PMLA 134.5 (2019): 1109-1114.
Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity , Columbia University Press, January 2013.
Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892 . New York and London: Routledge, 2007; paperback 2009.
(ed.) Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War. New York: Modern Language Association, 2016.
Series Editor with Laura Doyle and Maria Cristina Fumagalli; Edinburgh Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures.
"Forms That Matter: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and the Invention of Life-Style Writing." Feminist Modernist Studies 5 (20), September 2022. 161-180.
"Bodies at War." The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body, ed. Travis Foster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 73-86.
"Afterword," Animals and Animality in the Literary Field. Eds. Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand, Brian Massumi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
"Species States: Animal Control in Phil Klay's Redeployment." Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline. Ed. Frida Beckmann. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
"Public Reading and the Civil War Draft Lottery." American Periodicals. 26 (2), Fall 2016: 149-166.
"The Civil War's 'Empty Sleeve' and the Cultural Production of Disabled Americans." J 19: TheJournal of Nineteenth Century Americanists. 3 (1): Spring 2015. 41-65.
"Emily Dickinson's Animal Pedagogies." PMLA 124 (2), March 2009, 533-541.
"Margaret Fuller's American Translation." American Literature 76 (1), March 2004: 31-58.
Opinion Pieces in The New York Times, The Guardian, PBS Need to Know, Huffington Post.
Speaking Engagements
Invited Lecture: "American Hunger vs 'America Eats': Richard Wright, The Federal Writer's Project, and the Racial Politics of Lifestyle Writing." Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, Germany; July 27, 2023.
Invited Plenary Lecture and Roundtable Discussions, "What Would Scooby Do? Military Animals and Affective Economies in Phil Klay's "Redeployment." Cultures of Control – The Fourth Dialogues; Control: Beyond the Human: Colleen Boggs, Cary Wolfe, Ron Broglio, Frida Beckman. Bergsmannen, Aula Magna, Stockholm University. Stockholm, Sweden. Thursday, September 28, 2017.
Invited Plenary Lecture, "Emily Dickinson Unthought," Digital Humanities: Past Accomplishments, Future Directions, A Symposium in Honor of N. Katherine Hayles, University of Uppsala, Sweden, Thursday, May 17, 2018.
Invited Plenary Lecture, "After Human Exceptionalism: Biopolitics in the Anthropocene." Summer Institute for American Studies. June 24, 2017.
Invited Lecture, "Emily Dickinson's Civil War." University of Bamberg, Germany. June 1, 2017.
Invited Plenary Lecture: "Hamilton and the Politics of Hope." Bavarian American Academy Summer School: "Questions of the Archive." Nuremberg, Germany. May 29, 2017.
Keynote: "'In pawn for liberty': The Militarization of American Life, ca. 1863." 10th Annual Nineteenth Century Day Colloquium: Overwhelming Pessimisms in the 19th Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. March 24-25, 2017.
Distinguished Professor, "The United States between Transnationalism and Interculturality, the 20th and 21st centuries." Research Colloquium at the Center for American Studies in Rome and the Italian Association for North American Studies, in collaboration with the Fulbright Commission and the Embassy of the United States in Rome.
Two lectures:
"American Studies: the transnational and global perspectives." Thursday, November 19, 2015.
"America and World Literature in the 19th century." Friday, November 20, 2015.
Keynote, "Imagining the Ideal Body" at Université de Montréal, Canada, March 12-13, 2015.
Invited Lecture and Post-Graduate Seminar, Home, Crisis and the Imagination (AHRC-funded Research Network: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/imagininghome), Leeds Univ., U.K., March 9, 2015.
Invited Speaker, "Love Triangle With Dog: 'Whym Chow,' the 'Michael Fields,' and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animals' Affective Bonds," Animalities Symposium, Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, Norway. November, 2015.
Works in Progress
Playing with My Food: Experimental Writing and the Invention of Modern Taste (monograph)
Contact