Joan Burbick

Biography

(Ph.D., Brandeis)

My driving obsession is the culture and politics of the United States. In the 1970s as a graduate student, I became interested in how historical knowledge was used in the nineteenth century to create national narratives of progress, and I was drawn to writers who resisted this dominant mode of thinking about the emerging national culture. Even though my graduate education was grounded in literature, I studied at the graduate level comparative religion and fine arts. This interdisciplinary perspective has stayed with me throughout my life. I have continued my interest in national narratives by studying memoirs, factual reports, visual artifacts, and cultural rituals with the insights of gender, race, and class analysis. At present, I am working on what I call "public writing" in which the insights of cultural studies are grounded in the everyday lives of peoples living in the United States.

Publications

My early articles were on nineteenth-century American writers such as Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau, publishing in 1987, Thoreau’s Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language (University of Pennsylvania Press). In 1994, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge University Press) continued my research on national narratives. Since the 1970s, I have also been teaching courses on women writers, developing a class on women writers in the American West. Based on interviews with white and tribal women in the Pacific Northwest who were rodeo queens from the 1930s to the present, Rodeo Queens and the American Dream (PublicAffairs, 2002) examined how the cultural ritual of the rodeo was shaped by gender and race. My forthcoming book, Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy (The New Press, October, 2006) examines why and how guns have entered our national politics. My most recent article is “The Cultural Anatomy of a Gun Show,” forthcoming Stanford Law and Policy Review.

Research Interests

At present, I have two areas of research: River Time, a socio-environmental study of the Snake River and Viet Blue, a transnational project based on works by American and Vietnamese journalists, novelists, poets, and visual artists.

Graduate Teaching Interests

My graduate teaching is premised on principles of collaborative learning. We use the seminar as a learning and research room to engage ideas, theories, politics, literatures, and cultures. The free circulation of ideas and the ability to question and critique the ideologies of gender, race, class, and nation are strongly encouraged and supported.

Links

http://joanburbick.com/main.html