Mara de Gennaro
219 Vaughan Literature
(570) 577-1653
mara.degennaro@bucknell.edu
Mara de Gennaro (Ph.D. Columbia University) is an Assistant Professor of English. Her work focuses on practices and theorizations of modernism and postcolonialism, ranging from canonical British and expatriate American literature from the early twentieth century, to French and francophone Caribbean avant-gardes, to literature and theory of the global South, especially postcolonial African and Caribbean diasporas. She is particularly interested in the ways migration, expatriation, and exile have shaped our notions of modernity and globalization, and the part literature has played in shaping these notions. Before coming to Bucknell, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and a visiting assistant professor of postcolonial studies in the English department at Duke.
Current Projects
She is completing a book entitled "Modernism after Postcolonialism." The book's aims are twofold: it seeks to show, first, how the 21st-century world literature canon continues to be constituted, in its privileging of some postcolonial texts over others, by transatlantic modernist conceptions of literary form and value; and second, how transnational, especially Africana, postcolonial literature and theory have in turn transformed our understanding of transatlantic modernist literature, and indeed, of the definition of "modernism" itself.
Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Textual Practice, differences, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and several book collections.
Selected Courses Taught or Planned
International Modernism
20th-Century Novel
Global English
Modern Caribbean Literature
Comparative African Fiction
Introduction to World Literature
Globalization and its Discontents (seminar on postcoloniality in relation to globalization)
Modern Fiction (seminar on pairings of English modernist and global anglophone novels)
Virginia Woolf (seminar)
Negritude and its Critics (seminar)
Modernist Primitivism (seminar)
