Jean Carwile Masteller

Professor of English

Office: Olin 212
Telephone: 527-5120
Messages: (509) 527-5120
Fax: (509) 527-5039
E-mail: mastellerj@whitman.edu
    

Professor Jean Carwile Masteller came to Whitman after receiving her Ph.D. in American Studies in 1978 from the University of Minnesota, her M.A. in English from the University of Virginia and her B.A. (Magna cum Laude) in English from Lynchburg College. Before coming to Whitman, she taught English, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota and Illinois State University.

Her teaching areas include American Literature, American Studies, women writers, and the relationship of canonical and popular culture. She has taught special topics classes on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Woman's Space/Woman's Place, American Women Writers and Feminist Criticism, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Intertwining of Literature and Popular Culture, African American Women Writers, and Self and Society. She regularly teaches American Literature to 1865 and American Literature, 1865-1914.

Her research interests include work on nineteenth-century popular fiction and the working girl; on four occasions she has received Sally Ann Abshire Awards to involve students in her project. She has published on Henry David Thoreau and Andrew Jackson Downing, Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and W. D. Howells, and has contributed to the Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Recently she has published "Romancing the Reader: From Laura Jean Libbey to Harlequin Romance and Beyond." In addition to continuing her work on popular fiction for working girls in the late-nineteenth century and a project on the Jesse James Stories, she is currently studying the Walla Walla Woman's Reading Club, a group founded in 1894.

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