Rate My Professor Martha Cutter

Martha J. Cutter is Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut, where she has served since 2012, and Area Director of American Studies since spring 2023. Previously, she was Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at UConn from 2006 to 2012, Associate Professor of English at Kent State University from 1999 to 2006, Director of Graduate Studies at Kent State from 2002 to 2006, and held visiting assistant professor positions at the University of Oregon (1993-1994), University of Connecticut (1992-1993), and Swarthmore College (1991-1992). She earned a Ph.D. in English from Brown University in 1991 with highest honors, an M.A. from Brown in 1987 with highest honors, and a B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1984. She also served as Interim Director of the Institute for African American Studies at UConn from 2011 to 2012.

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..