Rate My Professor Martha Cutter

Cutter's research interests include American literature from 1865 to the present, ethnic American literature, African American literature, racial passing, slavery and abolition, visual culture, American Studies, multi-ethnic literature of the U.S., and 19th-century American history. She is the author of four books: The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1852 (University of Georgia Press, 2017), Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), and Unruly Tongue: Language and Identity in American Women’s Writing, 1850-1930 (University Press of Mississippi, 1999; winner of the 2001 Nancy Dasher Award from the College English Association). Her articles have appeared in journals such as MELUS, Slavery & Abolition, American Literary Realism, African American Review, and American Literature, on topics including medical racism in Toni Morrison’s fiction, Henry Box Brown’s resistance, racial passing in Charles Chesnutt’s work, and visual insubordination in early African American portraiture. Cutter has received the 2024 MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2019-2020 NEH Academic Year Fellowship, the 2018 UConn Research Excellence Program Grant ($10,000), fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society (2017) and UConn Humanities Institute (2014-2015), and the 2010 CELJ Award for Best Journal in North American Studies as Editor of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S..