Leslie Petty teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies. She joined the Rhodes faculty in 2003, after earning her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Professor Petty’s book, Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870-1920, was published in 2006. Her current research interests include the role of white female activists in abolition literature and the importance of bachelors and solitary women in American short stories and novels. Vita (PDF)
Ph.D., Department of English, The University of Georgia. 2003
Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate. The University of Georgia, Fall 2001
M.A., Department of English, Louisiana State University, Spring 1995
B.A., Emory University, English. Spring 1992
English 385 Bachelors and Solitary Women in American Literature
English 364 African-American Literature
English 361 American Literature from 1875-1945
English 361 Realism and Naturalism
English 360 American Literature until 1880
English 285 Text and Context
English 265 The “New Woman” in American Literature, 1890-1930
English 262 Survey of American Literature
English 220 Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers
English 215 The American Dream in Literature
English 210 Introduction to Literature
English 151 Critical Thinking and Writing
American Studies 200 Introduction to American Studies: The American Dream
Gender & Sexuality Studies 200 Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies
Books
Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870-1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.
Articles
“Amasa Delano’s Thwarted Desires: The Speculative Economy of Bachelorhood in Melville’s Benito Cereno.” 2009. (under consideration).
“The Political is Personal: The Feminist Lesson of Henry James’s The Bostonians.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 34 (2005): 377-403.
“Susan Petigru King.” American Women Prose Writers, 1820-1870. Ed. Amy E. Hudock and Katharine Rodier. Vol. 239. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2001. 174-181.
“The ‘Dual’-ing Images of la Malinche and la Virgen de Guadalupe in Cisneros′s The House on Mango Street.” MELUS 25.2 (2000): 119-32.
“‘She has some buried connection with these lives’: Autobiographical Acts in Can’t Quit You, Baby.” Ellen Douglas. Ed. Thomas L. McHaney and Noel Polk. Spec. issue of The Southern Quarterly 33.4 (1995): 121-29.
Book Reviews
“The Female Complaint by Lauren Berlant.” Journal of American History 37.1 (March 2009): 1154-1155.
“Front Page Girls by Jean Marie Lutes.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27.1 (Spring 2008): 186-88.
“Schoolgirls by Peggy Orenstein.” Louisiana Association for College Composition Journal for College Writing 2 (May 1995).