Featured Scholars
SEA Featured Scholar, December 2025: Caroline Wigginton
SEA Featured Scholar, December 2025: Caroline Wigginton How did you become interested in studying early American literature? I began my doctoral program with an interest in twentieth-century transatlantic fiction and the history of science. However, in my second year, while feeling as if maybe grad school was a mistake, I took a seminar in early…
SEA Featured Scholar, September 2025: Lori Rogers-Stokes
SEA Featured Scholar, September 2025: Lori Rogers-Stokes How did you become interested in studying early American literature? It was pure chance. After grad school, I came across James Cooper’s epic book, Tenacious of their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts, and found I was fascinated by the Puritans. It was also through Jeff Cooper that…
SEA Featured Scholar, June 2025: Bradley Dubos
SEA Featured Scholar, June 2025: Bradley Dubos How did you become interested in studying early American literature? I was trained as a high school English teacher and at that time was drawn mainly to Renaissance juggernauts like Dickinson, Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman. As an unseasoned teacher I found it easier to get students excited about…
SEA Featured Scholar, March 2025: Chip Badley
SEA Featured Scholar, March 2025: Chip Badley How did you become interested in studying early American literature? One is not born, but becomes an Early Americanist though any number of conversions. Mine was in 2017, when I attended my first SEA conference in Tulsa and realized just how energizing the “field” can be. I put…
SEA Featured Scholar, December 2024: Travis Foster
SEA Featured Scholar, December 2024: Travis Foster How did you become interested in studying early American literature? I entered graduate school planning to study American modernism and, specifically, Willa Cather. Interest in Willa Cather led me back in time to Sarah Orne Jewett, and that initial jump back in time acquired a momentum of its…
SEA Featured Scholar, September 2024: Joseph Rezek
SEA Featured Scholar, September 2024: Joseph Rezek How did you become interested in studying early American literature? I fell in love with Emerson and Thoreau my junior year in high school. I was coming out of the closet as gay at that time and they helped me, somehow. “Trust thyself!” Emerson said, and I thought……
SEA Featured Scholar, June 2024: Angela Calcaterra
SEA Featured Scholar, June 2024: Angela Calcaterra How did you become interested in studying early American literature? My interest in early America has always intersected with my interest in Indigenous literary histories. My undergraduate program was heavily focused on canonical British and American Literature, but I took a contemporary Native American literature class with Lucy…