University of Connecticut |Martha J. Cutter
Professor Martha J. Cutter is a new associate professor with a joint appointment in English and African American Studies. She the new editor of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. She received her PhD in English from Brown University and has been teaching for the last eleven years at Kent State University, in Ohio. Her first book, Unruly Tongue: Language and Identity in American Women’s Fiction, 1850-1930 (University Press of Mississippi, 1999) examines how African American and Anglo-American women writers from the nineteenth and twentieth century contested cultural dictates about women’s speech and writing through their portrayal of literary heroines with unruly voices. She recently completing a second book called Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) which examines how African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American writers employ the metaphor of cultural translation to undermine the separation often created in U.S. culture between the Ethnic and the American, and between disempowered discourse and authorized verbal communication. She has published articles in journals such as American Literature, African American Review, American Literary Realism, MELUS, Women’s Studies, Legacy, Criticism, and Callaloo on authors such as Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), Nella Larsen, Harriet Jacobs, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and David Wong Louie. She remains intrigued by the interrelationships between literary texts and cultural contexts, and she is currently at work on a third book, Passing: The Strange Cultural and Historical Meaning of a Word, which will trace the origins of racial passing and provide a cultural history of its changing significance in U.S. society from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.