Maria Seger
Associate Professor of English
Undergraduate Studies Coordinator
PhD, English, University of Connecticut, 2016
MA, English, University of Connecticut, 2012
BA, summa cum laude, English, University of Pittsburgh, 2010
Office: Griffin 250
Phone: 337-482-6970
E-mail: maria.seger@louisiana.edu
Pronouns: she/her
Teaching and Research Areas
Early and nineteenth-century US, Black, and ethnic literatures and cultures and critical race and ethnic studies.
Noteworthy
As a literary and cultural studies scholar, Maria is broadly interested in the violence of racial capitalism in US literatures and cultures. Her work primarily deals with how violence arises out of and impacts capitalist social relations and ideological production, especially as it relates to notions of selfhood, ownership, and state power across the long nineteenth century.
Right now, Maria is at work on her first book project, At All Costs: Extralegal Violence and Liberal Democracy in US Culture, which examines extralegal violence not as a lawless force that threatened US liberal-democratic governance but instead as emerging from and further entrenching the conditions that governance set.
Maria’s work appears or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Nineteenth-Century Literature, MELUS, and Studies in American Naturalism, and her edited collection Reading Confederate Monuments, winner of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s award for best edited collection of 2023, is available from the University Press of Mississippi.
For more on Maria’s work, visit www.mariaseger.com.
Solidarity with Black Lives Matter
First and foremost, Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity.
President Savoie called on all of the UL Lafayette community 'to erase racial, social, and educational inequities that exist on our campus.' To begin our part in that process, the Department of English acknowledges the foundational, structural racism of our nation, our University, and our discipline, and we know that we must make an accounting of the past injustices with which we have long been complicit. We as a department have not fought hard enough to challenge the racist legacies of our disciplines, which include both centering white, colonial voices and devaluing the long intellectual history of Black and anti-racist writing and thought. In a department of almost 50, we had no Black faculty at any rank during the last academic year. We are lagging behind other English departments and other universities in fighting for racial justice on our campus and in our classrooms, failing to live up to the legacy of our late colleague, Dr. Ernest J. Gaines. The work of an English department should be to challenge the anti-Blackness and racial oppression embedded in the literature we teach, the language we champion, and the pedagogy we practice.