Professor of American Literature and Culture

University of Geneva

Deborah Madsen is Professor of American Studies at the University of Geneva. Her work focuses on issues of settler-nationalism, indigeneity, and migration, exemplified by her work on American Exceptionalism, "UnAmerican

Exceptionalism," and the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny. She is co-editor with Gerald Vizenor of the SUNY Press series "Native Traces" and the convenor of the annual Geneva Native Studies Master Class. Recent publications include the monograph Understanding Gerald Vizenor (University of South Carolina Press 2009) and the edited book Native Authenticity: Transatlantic Approaches to Native American Literature (SUNY Press 2010). Currently she serves as President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS), as a member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA), on the Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of American Studies (published by Johns Hopkins University Press for the ASA), and on the Editorial Advisory Committee of PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America). She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Cape Town, Adelaide, and Cambridge, and is an honorary life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

She is currently completing the monograph, Contra Trauma: Reading Theory through Native American Culture, an interdisciplinary critique of dominant white-settler paradigms of trauma that fail to account for the specific historical experiences of indigenous peoples (dispossession, disempowerment, and genocide) and, as a consequence, inform failing models of social services (medical, judicial, educational). This project brings together her earlier work on poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist critical theory, allegorical language and representations of cultural crisis, in a comparative and interdisciplinary indigenous context. At the center of the project is a comparative study of the traumatic impact of the residential school systems that were used by the settler-states of Australia, Canada, and the US as part of the effort to create and sustain white supremacist nationalisms.

She has published extensively on Chinese diaspora, particularly in relation to Australia, Canada, and the United States, including the book Diasporic Histories: Archives of Chinese Transnationalism (co-ed. Hong Kong University Press 2009). She has a pedagogical interest in e-learning and has published widely on developments in this field.

For full details of her work: CURRICULUM VITAE

Proposals from prospective PhD students are invited in the following areas: literature and nationalism; cultural/psychoanalytic approaches to migration and transnationalism; Native American and comparative indigenous studies; gender theory and contemporary cultural body imagery.

PUBLICATIONS

Full-texts of recent unpublished essays and lectures

Sample chapters from published books

CURRENT COURSES

2011-2012 Course Information

Mémoire (MA Thesis)and Graduate Supervision

Information

PAST COURSES

2010-2011 Course Information

2009-2010 Course Information

2008-2009 Course Information

2007-2008 Course Information

2006-2007Course Information

2005-2006Course Information

2004-2005 Course Information

2003-2004 Course Information

2002-2003 Course Information