Department of English Language and Literature
Directory
Gretchen Woertendyke
Title: | Associate Professor |
Department: | English Language and Literature College of Arts and Sciences |
Email: | woertend@mailbox.sc.edu |
Phone: | 803-576-5954 |
Office: | HUO 511 |
Resources: |

Education
Ph.D. English, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 2007
B.A. English (cum laude), DePaul University, Chicago, IL, 1998
EMPLOYMENT
• Associate Professor, Department of English, University of South Carolina (2015-present)
• Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of South Carolina (2008-2014)
• Affiliate Faculty, African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies (2008-present)
Areas of Specialization
• 18th-19th Century American Literature
• Studies of the Novel
• African-American and Caribbean Literature
• Hemispheric American Studies
Recently Taught Courses
GRADUATE
ENGL 840 Graduate Seminar: Maritime Literatures
ENGL 750 Graduate Seminar: The Atlantic World Novel
ENGL 742 Hemispheric American Studies-the long nineteenth century
ENGL 700 Introduction to Graduate Studies
UNDERGRADUATE
ENGL 490 Independent Study: Postcolonial Literatures
SCHC 457 Honors Pro Seminar: Pirates, Ships, and the Atlantic
SCHC 456 Honors Seminar – Secrets & Lies
ENGL 429 Early American Literature
ENGL 428b African American Literature, 1903-present
ENGL 412 US Literature, 1830-1860
ENGL 383 Romanticism
ENGL 384 Realism (European and American)
Professional Accolades
• Appointed, Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow of English Language and
Literature
• Selected, South Carolina Collaborative for Racial Reconciliation Faculty Fellow
• Provost Humanities Research Grant, University of South Carolina, 2013
• American Council of Learned Society (ACLS) Faculty Fellowship, 2010-2011
• Josephine Abney Fellowship for Research in Women’s and Gender Studies, University
of South Carolina, 2011
• Mayers Fellow, Huntington Library, Two-Month Residency, 2009
• Morton E. Kahn Award, Best Dissertation, SUNY Stony Brook, 2007
Current Research Projects
“A Secret History of Race”.
Selected Publications
BOOK
• Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre (Oxford University Press, 2016)
PUBLISHED AND FORTHCOMING ESSAYS
• “Region.” Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, Vol. 2, 1820-1860.Ed. Justine S. Murison. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (commissioned, forthcoming).
• "History, Romance, and the Novel." Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown, Ed. 2 Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro. Oxford, Oxford University Press (2019):
155-170.
• “Teaching Ira and Isabella:, or The Natural Children. A Novel, Founded in Fiction. Common-Place (2019), Just Teach One.
• “Secret History in the Early Nineteenth-Century Americas.” The Secret History in Literature, 1660-1820. Eds., Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (2017):
242-255.
• "Haiti and the U.S. Novel" The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States, Eds Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania
Press (2016): 232-249.
• "Trials and Confessions of Fugitive Slave Narratives" Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas, Eds. Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finesth. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press
(2014): 47-73.
• "Geography, Genre, and Hemispheric Regionalism," Atlantic Studies, 10:2 (2013): 211-227.
• "Romance to Novel: A Secret History." NARRATIVE, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Oct 2009): 255-273.
• "John Howison’s New Gothic Nationalism and Transatlantic Exchange." Early American Literature. 44, 2 (2008): 309-335.
REVIEWS
• Candace Ward, Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age
of Emancipation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017). ALH Online Review, Series XVIII, March, 2019.
• Émeric Bergeaud, Stella: A Novel of the Haitian Revolution, trans. and ed. Lesley S. Curtis and Christen Mucher (New York: New York University
Press, 2015). ALH Online Review, Series VIII, October, 2016.
• Kennedy, Gerald J. Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe. “Poe’s Queer Eye.” Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation. “Poe’s Queer Eye.” Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 50, 2017,
pp. E5-E11.
• Anna Brickhouse, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis
de Velasco, 1560-1945. Oxford University Press, 2015. Early American Literature, Vol. 50, No.3,
2015: 953-959.
• Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and The Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45:3 (2012): 455-460.
• Pratt, Lloyd. Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and The Philosophy of History, 40:2 (2011): 17-22.
• Shapiro, Stephen. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading The Atlantic World-System. Philadelphia: U of Penn Press, 2008. Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 2 (June 2010): 339-343.
EDITORIAL WORK
• “In The Cage.” A Critical Companion to Henry James, Eds. Eric Haralson and Kendall Johnson. Facts On File: New York, NY, (2009): 246-255.
Other Information
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
• Program Committee, c19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
• Book Review Editor, Clio, A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History. 2014-2018
• Reader/Referee for the following journals: African American Review, Early American Studies, Genre, ESQ, and Studies in American Fiction
PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
• American Studies Association
• American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies
• Modern Language Association
• Society of Early Americanists
• Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists