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Anita Duneer

Craig-Lee Hall (CL) 166​
(401) 456-8658
(401) 456-8028
aduneer@ric.edu

​Academic Background

B.A. University of Alaska
M.A., Ph.D. University of Connecticut

I have been teaching full time at Rhode Island College since 2009, but I have a longer history with the College. I first came to RIC in 1997 as an undergraduate through the National Student Exchange Program. A few years later, while completing my graduate work, I taught courses in RIC’s Gender and Women’s Studies and Africana Studies programs. I currently teach courses in Postcolonial Literature, Literary Theory, African American and Ethnic American Literatures, 19th- to early-20th-century American Literature, and Maritime Literature.

Much of my research has been about real women or fictional female characters at sea. I’m currently working on a book manuscript titled “Jack London and the Sea: American Naturalism and the Maritime Romantic Ideal.” What first drew me into my current scholarship on Jack London was his proto-feminist treatment of his active female characters in his sea novels. London appeals to me because he brings together my favorite topics of research—women and the sea; travel, adventure, and exploration; and turn-of-the-century attitudes toward gender and race. In a broad sense, all of my work is concerned with racial, ethnic, or gender identity, and most of my published work addresses literature that explores characters’ desire to escape from social conventions and/or new perspectives made possible by travel (usually at sea).

I co-chair Open Books – Open Minds, RIC’s common book program, which engages students with the broader RIC and Rhode Island communities in a variety of events inspired by each year’s common book selection. I also organize the annual Open Books – Open Minds Student Conference, which takes place in the spring and and caps off each year of exciting programming. See what’s happening this year at www.ric.edu/obom!

Outside of school, some of my favorite things are my golden retrievers, Zoe and Sylvie; running, biking, skiing, and sailing; strong coffee (with a good book) in the morning and dark chocolate in the afternoon.

Courses Taught

English 121: Studies in Literature and Nation: Literature of the Contact Zone
English 202: Literary Studies: Theory and Criticism
English 207: American Literature, Beginnings to the Present
English 302: American Literature from 1860-1914
English 315: Literature, Environment, and Ecocriticism
English 326: Studies in African American Literature
English 327: Studies in Multicultural American Literatures
English 336: Reading Globally
English 460: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Maritime Literature
English 524: Caribbean Literatures
FYS 100: Coming of Age in America and the World: Truth and Imagination in the Graphic Memoir
FYS 100: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Maritime Literature
FYS 100: Open Books – Open Minds: Exploring the RIC Common Book in Literary and Cultural Contexts
FYW 100: Introduction to Academic Writing

Publications

“Last Stands and Frontier Justice in Jack London’s Pacific and Ernest Hemingway’s Key West,” Studies in American Naturalism 11.1 (Summer 2016): 23-42.

“The Old Man and the City: Literary Naturalism and the Postcolonial Subject in Achy Obejas’s Ruins,” Studies in American Naturalism 10.2 (Winter 2015): 150-171.

“Androgyny and Sexuality in The Sea-Wolf.” The MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jack London. Ed. Kenneth K. Brandt and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. New York: Modern Language Association, 2015. 93-101.

“Crafting the Sea: Bridging the Gulf Between Maritime Romance and Realism in Jack London’s Martin Eden.” American Literary Realism 47.3 (Spring 2015): 250-271.

The MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jack London, edited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. New York: Modern Language Association, 2015. 93-101.

“Jack London’s Seafaring Women: Desire, Risk, and Savagery,” Studies in American Naturalism 8.2 (Winter 2013): 186-213.

“Voyaging Captains’ Wives: Feminine Aesthetics and the Uses of Domesticity in the Travel Narratives of Abby Jane Morrell and Mary Wallis,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56.2 (Spring 2010): 192-230.

“Margaret West: A ‘sea of contradictions’ in The Mutiny of the Elsinore,” The Call: The Magazine of the Jack London Society 20.2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 3-5.

“Brooklyn in the Making: Reading the Existential Utopian Vision in Paul Auster’s Smoke through The Wizard of Oz,” The Midwest Quarterly 50.1 (Autumn 2008): 57-73.

“Critical Editions of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: Literary and Theoretical Trends, Pedagogical Choices,” ALN: The American Literary Naturalism Newsletter 2.2 (Spring 2008): 21-28.

“Sarah Orne Jewett and (Maritime) Literary Tradition: Coastal and Narrative Navigations in The Country of the Pointed Firs,” American Literary Realism 39.3 (Spring 2007): 222-240. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism Vol. 138, Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Detroit: Gale/Cengage, 2010:79-88.

“On the Verge of a Breakthrough: Projections of Escape from the Attic and the Thwarted Tower in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Susan Glaspell’s The Verge,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 18.1 (Winter 2006): 34-53.

“Postpositivist Realism and Mandala: Toward Reconciliation and Reunification of Vietnamese and American Identities in Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 17.2 (Winter 2002): 204-220.

Page last updated: January 18, 2019