Rate My Professor Carrie Bramen

Carrie Tirado Bramen is a Professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo, College of Arts and Sciences. She earned her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1994, M.A. in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex in 1988, and B.A. (Honors) in English with a minor in Latin American Studies from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, in 1987. Her career at UB includes key administrative appointments: Director of the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender (UB Gender Institute) from 2017 to 2023, during which she transitioned programming online amid the Covid pandemic—increasing attendance and securing the institute's largest funding increase—and Executive Director of the UB Humanities Institute from 2007 to 2013. She served as Program Chair of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists from 2016 to 2018 and will begin as Associate Secretary for Programs and Conferences with the Melville Society in 2026.

Bramen’s scholarship centers on nineteenth-century American literature, U.S. Latinx literature, the transatlantic nineteenth century, cultural history, feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, and intellectual history. She authored American Niceness: A Cultural History (Harvard University Press, 2017), exploring niceness in democratic personality and imperial contexts, and The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Harvard University Press, 2000), co-winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first book. Select publications include “Niceness in a Neoliberal Age” (Public Culture, 2018), “Flirting in Yankeeland” in The Latino Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2016), and “James, Pragmatism and the Realist Ideal” in The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011). She has written for The Washington Post, The Conversation, Black Agenda Report, and Political Theology Network. Currently researching astrology in the U.S. for a book tentatively titled “Journey-work of the Stars,” following her essay “Astrological Speculation on Wall Street in the Progressive Era.” Bramen teaches nineteenth-century American literature, the American 1890s, U.S. Latinx literature, travel writing, and creative nonfiction. She received three teaching awards, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and presented “American Niceness from Plymouth Rock to Standing Rock” in Vermont Humanities’ Winter Series (February 2026).