Kathleen Donegan, Assistant Professor

Office: 440 Wheeler

Phone: 510-642-0170

Professional Statement

Kathleen Donegan (Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University, 2006) writes and teaches about literature and culture in early America, from New World encounters through the first decades of the republic. Her special interest is in the early seventeenth century settlement -- and un-settlement -- of English peoples on Native lands. Donegan's book project, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and the Writing of Settlement in Colonial America, investigates the relationship between suffering and violence in these outposts and contact zones, and the role of misery in constituting colonial subjectivity. She also teaches courses on early American women writers; captivity, slavery and piracy; the colonial Atlantic world; racial formation in early America; and is working on an edited collection of colonial shipwreck narratives.

Selected Publications and Papers Delivered

Publications

(forthcoming) “Literature” entry (3500 words) in American Centuries: The Ideas, Issues, and Trends that Made U.S. History, Volume Two: The Seventeenth Century, edited by John Demos. Facts on File.

“True Relations and Critical Fictions: The Case of the Personal Narrative in Colonial American Writing.” In A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer. Malden, MA: Blackwell (2005): 446-63.

“ ‘As Dying, Yet Behold We Live’: Catastrophe and Interiority in Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation.” Early American Literature 37, no. 1 (2002): 9-37.

Book Review. William Bradford’s Books: Of Plimmouth Plantation and the Printed Word. Early American Literature 39, no. 1 (2004): 177-82.

Selected Papers Delivered

(forthcoming) “Fantasy Island: Going Native on Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines,” Society of Early Americanists Bi-Annual Conference, Hamilton, Bermuda, 2008.

“Rumors from Roanoke: Or, How to Tell a True War Story,” William and Mary Quarterly and U.S.C-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Annual Workshop: Writing Early American History, San Marino, 2008.

“The Cries of Our Sick Men: Jamestown and the Discourse of Misery,” Faculty Colloquium, University of California, Berkeley, 2007.

“True Relations and Critical Fictions: Colonial Personal Narratives,” American Origins Seminar, U.S.C.-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, San Marino, 2004.

“Scare Able to Bury their Dead: The Surprising History of Unearthed Bones at Plymouth Plantation,” Organization of American Historians, Memphis, 2003.

“Roundtable: Eloquence is Power,” American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Conference (ASECS), Long Beach 2003.

“Cast Upon an Unknown Land: Some Uses of Trauma in Colonial Settlement Narratives,” American Studies Association, Houston, 2002.

“Rendering Disaster as Deliverance: The Remarkable Relation of Jonathan Dickinson’s Florida Shipwreck,” American Literature Association, Long Beach, 2002.

“Cast Away in the New World: Writing, Catastrophe, and the Settlement of British North America,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Boston, 2002.

“Writing American Lives,” Early Ibero-Anglo Americanist Summit, Tuscon, 2002.

Office Hours

W 1-3