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Jennifer Desiderio, PhD Professor of English
Office: Tower 907
Phone: 888-2681
desider1@canisius.edu
Office hours: M 12-3, R 1-2, and by appointment
Jennifer Desiderio, PhD grew up in Rochester. She received her B.A. in English and History from Marquette University and her Ph.D. in English from Ohio State University. She enjoys cooking, gardening, and reading contemporary fiction.
Her major teaching area is early American literature to 1900. Some of her interests include sentimental and sensational literature, American Romanticism, authorship in America, women's literature, epistolarity, and the novel in 18th- and 19th-century America. She especially enjoys Herman Melville, Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Webster Foster, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Dr. Desiderio's major teaching area is early American literature, throughout the 19th century, and particularly, the literature of the Early Republic and antebellum America. Her interests include the American novel, the profession of authorship in America, and race and gender in American literature more broadly. Her recent classes have included English 319: American Renaissance, English 319: Captivity Narratives, and English 396: The Rise of the Early American Novel.
Her articles include "The Periodical as Monitorial and Interactive Space in Judith Sargent Murray's 'The Gleaner'" in American Periodicals (2008) and "Cultivating Cultural Cohesion in Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel" inStudies in American Fiction (forthcoming October 2011). She is serving as the co-editor of a collection of essays on Susanna Rowson, entitled Beyond Charlotte Temple: New Approaches to Susanna Rowson, appearing in the journal Studies in American Fiction. She is also the co-editor of the Broadview edition of Hannah Webster Foster's American novels, The Coquette and The Boarding School. She has delivered papers on topics ranging from gossip in the eighteenth century to Charles Brockden Brown's sentimental novels.
