Deborah Lea Madsen

Deborah Madsen is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Geneva. Her work focuses on issues of settler-nationalism, indigeneity, and migration, exemplified by her work on American Exceptionalism and the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny. Her most recent books include Understanding Gerald Vizenor (University of South Carolina Press, 2009), and the edited collections, Native Authenticity: Transatlantic Approaches to Native American Literature (SUNY Press 2010) and Louise Erdrich (Continuum, 2012). She is immediate past President of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS), and has served on the Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of American Studies (published by Johns Hopkins University Press for the American Studies Association), and on the Editorial Advisory Committee of PMLA. Her current work includes “The Exceptional Power of Bones in Heid E. Erdrich’s National Monuments,” an analysis of Erdrich’s poetic engagement with the subversive relation between indigenous human remains and the ideology of American Exceptionalism through the Anishinaabe philosophy of bimaadiziwin; and an essay on Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead that traces Silko’s indigenous interpretation of Freud’s concept of the “memory trace” through her use of free indirect narrative style (forthcoming in David L. Moore, ed. Leslie Marmon Silko. Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction). She is currently editing the Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. She has published extensively on Chinese immigration, particularly in relation to Australia, Canada, and the United States, including the book Diasporic Histories: Archives of Chinese Transnationalism (co-ed. Hong Kong University Press 2009). She has a pedagogical interest in digital humanities and e-learning, and has published widely on developments in this field.