Leslie Petty is Professor of English and the T.K. Young Chair of English Literature. She teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of first wave feminism and American literature, and her work appears in journals such as Studies in the American Short Story and Legacy. She is the co-editor of New Orleans in Poetry and Prose, which is forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi, and she is currently writing Feminism, Modern Fiction, and American Literary Culture. Dr. Petty earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and has been at Rhodes since 2003. She also serves as the Executive Coordinator for the American Literature Association.
Selected Publications
Books
“The Most Salient Point in American Life: Voting Rights and Fiction in the Nineteenth Century.” The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics. Ed. John D. Kerkering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (accepted and forthcoming)
Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870-1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.
Articles
“Queer Feminism in Djuna Barnes’s Journalism.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 40.1 (forthcoming).
“Feminism and Work in Edna Ferber’s ‘Sisters Under Their Skin.’” Studies in the American Short Story. 1.1 (April 2020) 19-37.
“Realism and the New Woman.” The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism. Ed. Keith Newlin. Oxford University Press, 2019. 447-464.
“‘Grim old London welcomed me back’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Second Foray into Europe.” Transnationalism and Modern American Women Writers, special issue of E-rea. 16.2 (2019): 1-15.
“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).
Education
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
