In About Us

Geneva Gano

Geneva Gano received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007, as well as a certificate of concentration in women’s studies (also UCLA). Her current research draws upon insights in postcolonial, queer, and environmental criticism, and involves literary ideas about place and identity in the North American West. In 2007-2008, she is teaching “Brokeback: Queering Western Literature” (Fall) and “The Modern West: Modernism, Revolution, and Indigenismo” (Spring) in the English Department. (Click here to download "Brokeback" Syllabus) (Click here to download "The Modern West" syllabus)

Teaching
I believe that one’s intellect need not be divorced from one’s life: that an “intellectual life” can involve action and engagement, drawing its inspiration from incidents in “the real world” as routinely and essentially as from cerebral and scholarly questions. This has motivated me to find ways to ask students to take into consideration the context of both literary production and reception. In the attempt to reflect the diversity of interests students bring to my classes, all of the courses I have developed and taught maintain a primary focus on what we usually think of as “literature” (fiction, poetry, and drama), but also incorporate a variety of other materials, including film, comics, photographs, manifestos and zines, contemporary news articles, and theoretical essays. Students bring to the classroom different strengths, and my goal is to encourage students to develop their strengths and work on their weaknesses by making assignments that draw upon both individual and interpersonal skills. Reading, writing, thinking, speaking, and being are all part of the same project of personal development. I imagine that fostering this development is central to my role as a teacher, and a critical component of being a successful writing and literature instructor.

Research
My current research interests involve questions concerning the relationship between ideas about place and national identity in the United States, with a special focus on the development of this relationship in the early twentieth century. Race and place are vitally connected in my work, as are other major ways in which identity is formed, from gender and sexuality to economic class. Each of my current projects asks who is included and excluded from “America,” and how a sense of belonging in place—especially in the West and along the borderlands—affects the sense of national belonging. Most intriguing to me are those moments in which individuals conceive of themselves in opposition to “Americans,” what compels them to do so, and how they articulate a sense of difference from the nation creatively.

Currently I am at work on two major research projects:

“Un-American Places: Geography, Race, and Nationalism in Modern U.S. Literature” considers the ways in which writers in the early twentieth century responded to World War I by depicting particular places as antinationalist spaces. This study shows how political and cultural territories (such as sacred Native American sites, urban ghettos, and the Hispanic U.S. southwest) and natural and built borderlands (including deserts, beaches, and islands as well as bridges and skyscrapers) served to represent a more pervasive sense of national un-belonging to a number of modern writers who felt themselves to be writing against (and in response to) a narrowly-defined Americanism. In this project, I explore how these writers defined a sense of national subjecthood in close relationship to a sense of place. Due to its cultural and geographical marginality, the U.S. West was an especially important location for modern writers’ development of a body of anti-nationalist literature during this period.

I am also working on a separate project titled “‘We Believe in Mexico:’ Revolution in Modern American Literature.” Following Perry Anderson’s assertion that the “proximity of social revolution” was critical to the development of modernism, this study explores the permeable borders of “American” modernism to argue for a different sort of internationalist impulse toward revolution in the Americas. I propose that the Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910, granted Mexico a unique place in the American modernist imagination. I am especially interested in two areas of influence: the ways in which a proletarian modernism in the U.S. was influenced by Mexican culture and politics, and how the significant interest in Native American ways and traditions became “modern” (as opposed to merely “primitive”) in the views of such authors as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes.