jean pfaelzer

Professor
American Studies, Asian American Studies, Cultural Studies, Utopian Studies, Women's Studies, 19th Century American Literature
Office: 316 Memorial Hall
Phone: (302) 831-6722
E-Mail: pfaelzer@udel.edu
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Jean Pfaelzer (B.A., M.A. University of California, Berkeley; Graduate Diploma in Literature and Society, Cambridge University ; Ph.D. University College , London ) is Professor of English and American Studies, with a joint appointment in the Honors Program and an affiliated appointment in Women's Studies. She is the author of Driven Out! The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Random House 2007); Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism; The Utopian Novel in America; ed. The Rebecca Harding Davis Reader; ed. critical edition of Mizora, Mary E. Bradley Lane.
She has just completed work on a documentary for PBS/KEET on the Chinese Experience in Humboldt County.

She is the author of 30+ articles in the areas of nineteenth century American Literature, women's literature, feminist theory, utopian fiction, and cultural theory. She is the director of the University Honors Writing Fellowship Program. She was Chair of the American Studies Association International Women's Task Force, served on the Women's Committee of American Studies Association. She was appointed to the Washington D.C. Commission for Women, and was a consultant for and now serves on the American S. Association for the Coal Employment Project, the organization of women coal miners.

Jean Pfaelzer teaches undergraduate classes in American literature; American women's literature; labor fiction, film and culture; and utopian fiction, film and culture. She teaches graduate courses in cultural studies, feminist theory, realism and representation, and American women writers and their cultural and political contexts. She has recently directed dissertations in the areas of nineteenth century American women playwrights, nineteenth century immigrant Irish women's novels, shipwrecks and the public culture of trauma, nineteenth century Chinese-American women's fiction, American sentimentalism, and transracial adoption narratives.