Maria Seger

Assistant Professor of English

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

Teaching and Research Areas

Early and nineteenth-century American literature, African American literature, US ethnic literatures, critical race and ethnic studies.

Noteworthy

As a literary and cultural studies scholar, Dr. Seger is broadly interested in the violence of racial capitalism in US literature and culture. 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, Seger is at work on her first book project, At All Costs: Property and Extralegal Violence in American Literature and Culture, which examines extralegal violence not as a lawless force that threatened American liberal-democratic governance but instead as emerging from and further entrenching the conditions that governance set.

Before coming to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Seger was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point and served as Assistant Editor of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Her work appears in Callaloo, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Studies in American Naturalism.

For more on Seger’s work, visit www.mariaseger.com.