Melanie B. Taylor
Professor of English & Creative Writing
Professor of Native American Studies
House Professor, North Park House
Executive Editor, Native South journal
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
20th and 21st century American literature and culture; U.S. Southern literature and culture; Native American literature and culture; American studies; postcolonial literature and theory; globalization studies; comparative studies of the Americas; economic history and theory; working class studies; women's studies
Contact
Department(s)
Native American & Indigenous Studies
Education
- B.A. Smith College
- M.A. Boston University
- Ph.D. Boston University
Selected Publications
BOOKS
The Indian in American Southern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (University of Georgia Press, 2012)
Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002 (University of Georgia Press, 2008).
EDITED VOLUMES & JOURNAL ISSUES:
The Cambridge Companion to Native American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, in preparation)
The Cambridge Companion to the Native American Novel (Cambridge University Press, in preparation)
Norton Critical Edition of William Faulkner's Light in August (Norton, forthcoming 2021)
"Indigeneity and the Anthropocene," Theories & Methodologies Forum in PMLA (January 2021)
The Cambridge History of Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
I Am Where I Come From: Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, eds. Andrew Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, and Melanie Benson Taylor (Cornell University Press, 2016)
ESSAYS
"Indigenous Interruptions in the Anthropocene," PMLA Guest Column (Jan. 2021)
"Orange is the New Red," Forum on Tommy Orange, PMLA (May 2020)
"Locating Race," in Race in American Literature and Culture, ed. John Richard Ernest (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
"Southern Literature and the Anthropocene/Capitalocene," in Insiders, Outsiders: New Directions in the Intellectual History of the American South, eds. Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2021)
"Karen Russell: A South without Borders," in 21st Century Southern Writers, eds. Jean W. Cash and Richard Gaughran (University Press of Mississippi, 2021)
"Fictions of the Native South," in The Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South, ed. Harilaos Stecopoulos (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
"The Afterlives of the Archive," Foreword to Indigenous Archives in the Digital Age (University Press of New England, 2019)
"Why Native Southern Literatures Matter," with Eric Gary Anderson, Introduction to Special Issue of Native South, ed. Melanie Benson Taylor and Eric Gary Anderson, volume 12 (2019)
"Letting the Other Story Go: The Native South in and beyond the Anthropocene," with Eric Gary Anderson, Special Issue of Native South, ed. Melanie Benson Taylor and Eric Gary Anderson, volume 12 (2019)
"Katherine Anne Porter's Familiar Countries," American Literary History (Summer 2019)
"Doom and Deliverance: Faulkner's Dialectical Indian," Faulkner and the Native South (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series), (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2019)
"The Landscape of Disaster: Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and the Soundings of Indigenous Silence," with Eric Gary Anderson, TSLL (Texas Studies in Language and Literature), Special Issue on "Modernism and Native America," 59.3 (Fall 2017)
"Introduction: Coming Home," I Am Where I Come From: Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, eds. Andrew Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, and Melanie Benson Taylor (Cornell University Press, 2016)
"In Deep," South: A Scholarly Journal vol. xlviii (Fall 2015), 68-73
"Surviving the Economic Apocalypse: Capitalism, Consumption, and the Indian Imaginary in Karen Russell's Swamplandia!," Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region, eds. Michele Coffey and Jodi Skipper (forthcoming, University of Georgia Press, 2016)
"Modernism [modernity; backwardness]" in Critical Terms for Southern Studies, eds. Scott Romine and Jennifer Greeson (University of Georgia Press, 2016)
"Faulkner's Doom: Capitalism, Colonialism, and All the Southern Dead," Undead Souths, eds. Eric Gary Anderson et al (Louisiana State University Press, 2015)
"Faulkner and the New Southern Studies," The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. John T. Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
"Being the Emergency: Response to Hortense Spillers' 'States of Emergency,'" The Power of Writing, eds. Christiane Donahue and Kelly Blewett (University Press of New England, 2015)
"A Killing Greed: Capitalism, Casinos, and the Fetish of Culture in Contemporary Native American Literature," Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature, eds. Andrew Lawson and Stephen Shapiro (Routledge, 2014)
"The Economics of Eating: Native Recipes for Survival in Contemporary Southeastern Indian Literature," Southern Foodways and Southern Literature, eds. David A. Davis and Tara Powell (University Press of Mississippi, 2014)
"Unsettling Accounts: The Violent Economies of the Ledger," Multiple Narratives in Plains Indian Ledger Art: Essays on the Mark Lansburgh Collection, ed. Colin Calloway (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012)
"The Indian in the American Literary Imagination," The Hovey Murals at Dartmouth College: Culture and Contexts, ed. Brian Kennedy (University Press of New England, 2011)
"The Native Screen: American Indians in Contemporary Southern Film," American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, eds. Kathryn McKee and Deborah Barker (University of Georgia Press, 2011)
"The Fetish of Surplus Value; or, What the Ledgers Say," Global Faulkner (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series) , A Trefzer and A Abadie (eds.), (2008)
"Indian Givers: Reterritorializing the South in Contemporary Native American Literature," Mississippi Quarterly , 60:1 (2007).
"Southern and Western Native Americans in Barry Hannah's Fiction," Perspectives on Barry Hannah , M Bone (ed.), (2006).