Biography

Education
Drs.Litt. University of Amsterdam, Netherlands 1981 Cum Laude 

D.Phil. University of Sussex 1991

Role

Reader in English and American Literature

Interests in brief

• American ethnic and immigrant writing, especially bi- and multilingual American literature from colonial times to the present
• Americanization as a program for the assimilation of immigrants in the early 20th C
• African American literature and culture, specifically women's writing
• New York city and its immigrant cultures from New Amsterdam to the present

Research profile

Since the beginning of my academic career I have been interested in so called 'minority literatures' and the writing of social movements. Beginning with feminism and the literature of the Women's Liberation Movement, which was my Doctoral research, I expanded my research interest in gender to African American and post-colonial literature and theory. These two strands of interest in race and gender culminated in the monographs Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (1994) and Alice Walker (2000). A second edition, which brings the latter up to date both with Alice Walker's work since 1999 and with Walker scholarship, was published in 2011. This was needed because as Walker's work has become better and better known over the years, it has also become more and more controversial, so in this second, fully revised and extended edition I address the critical strife and discuss its effects on Walker's later prose and her literary/activist persona. At around the same time I also published 'How to Read Michelle Obama,' a path-breaking  essay that seeks to understand the first African American First Lady in the context of African American literature and historiography (Patterns of Prejudice 45: 1-2 2011).

Over the past ten years I have added yet another -but related- feature to my research profile in that I have chiefly been working on ethnic, and more specifically immigrant, literature of the United States. Publication-wise this started, appropriately enough, with Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (2001) which I co-authored with Helena Grice, Martin Padget, and Candida Hepworth, but it has continued with several articles and book chapters on writers such as Bharati Mukherjee and Eva Hoffman. This research has taken me further and further afield as well as back in time; my interest in the Americanization campaign of the early 20th C is refelected in 'When Is an Immigrant's  Autobiography Not an Immigrant Autobiography? The Americanization of Edward Bok', just published in MELUS (print version Fall 2013).

Currently my research focuses very much  on bi-and multilingual immigrant writing, which has always existed in the United States but is going to become more and more widespread as global migration streams and migrant cultures proliferate. 

Current projects

The intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality continues to inform my work, but I have been  increasingly drawn towards analysis of immigrant writing as linguistic artefacts rather than solely as socio-historical documents, because this material, formal, or simply textual dimension of ethnic literature has been rather neglected in critical scholarship. 

My next book, entitled Wander Words: Language Migration in American "Ethnic" Literature therefore reads immigrant autobiography, essays, and fiction for their use of languages other than English and asks: how do (im-)migrants represent themselves in an American cultural context which is new to them, and in a language that is not their first? Rather than plead for the uses of translation, as other scholars in the field have done, I show in this study the radical potential of  bi- and multilingualism for a new writing and reading practice that entails a new conception of 'American' literature as not just written in English-only. Principally however Wanderwords presents a poetics of writing in English combined with other languages and theorizes the practice of so (badly) called 'code-switching' in literary signification.

Thanks to an AHRC grant which in part funded the research, WanderWords is near completion. I am currently revising the typescript and preparing it for publication in 2014.

Research plans

• essay on Junot Diaz's blinigual writing, for journal article
• essay on early 20th C Americanization programs and their legacy in the 21st C, for journal article
• editing of critical volume on new African American writing for Bloomsbury
• new research on New York City and immigrant cultures, from an interdisciplinary perspective

Doctoral supervision

I am interested in supervising Doctoral research on race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality in American culture, from literary, theoretical and/or interdisciplinary perspectives.

I would welcome in particular research proposals with an Atlanticist dimension (Europe and America; the relation between the Americas, the African diaspora) or with a multilingual dimension (e.g. American literature in languages other than English, Latin@ writing).

Porposals on individual writers such as Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldua, Bharati Mukherjee, Junot Diaz would also be of interest.

American Identities

American Literature to 1890

American Literature 1890-today

America in the Twentieth Century

Culture and Consumption

Roots of America

ImagiNation: the Great American novel? (MA)

(Im)Migrant America

The Look of America

New York

Race and Ethnicity in American Literature and Theory since 1945 (MA) 

Single American Author

Student Consultation

Summer 2013 by e-mail only

 m.lauret@sussex.ac.uk

Lauret, Maria (2013) When is an immigrant's autobiography not an immigrant autobiography? The Americanization of Edward Bok. MELUS , 38 (3). ISSN 0163-755X (In Press)

Lauret, Maria (2013) Wander words: language migration in American literature. NYU Press, New York. (In Press)

Lauret, Maria (2011) Alice Walker. MacMillan Modern Novelists . Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke ; New York. ISBN 9780230575899

Lauret, Maria (2011) How to Read Michelle Obama. Patterns of Prejudice, 45 (1-2). pp. 94-117. ISSN 0031-322X

Lauret, Maria (2010) Alice Walker. In: A companion to twentieth-century United States fiction. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK ; Malden, MA, pp. 489-496. ISBN 9781405146913

Lauret, Maria (2009) Bharati Mukherjee's English: the multilingualism of an American novelist. In: Post-national enquiries: essays on ethnic and racial border-crossing. Cambridge Scholars, pp. 170-190. ISBN 9781443805933

Lauret, Maria (2004) Alice Malsenior Walker. In: African American Lives. Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, pp. 840-842. ISBN 9780195160246

Grice, Helena, Hepworth, Candida, Lauret, Maria and Padget, Martin (2001) Beginning Ethnic American Literatures. Beginnings . Manchester University Press 2001. ISBN 0-7190-5760-0