Martha Pitts

Assistant Professor of English, Department of Literature, Languages, Writing, and Humanities

Contact Information

Courses

• American Literature II
• African American Literature
• Women’s Voices
• International Survey
• Masterpieces of World Literature II
• Research and Argument
• Major American Writers
• Introduction to Rhetoric and Inquiry

Research

• U.S. life writing
• African American literature (19th and early 20th c.)
• Western American literature
• feminist literary criticism

Education

• AB, Princeton University
• MA, George Mason University
• PhD, Louisiana State University

Academic Profile

I am an Assistant Professor of English, and I teach the literature of a multicultural America using texts that engage students with conflicting and competing ideas of Americanness. I have taught at several institutions, including Georgetown University, Howard University, Towson University, and Louisiana State University. My work has appeared in Staging Women’s Lives in Academia: Gendered Life Stages in Language and Literature (SUNY Press 2017), Patricia Hill Collins: Reconceiving Motherhood (Demeter Press 2014), Callaloo, Times-Picayune, Washington City Paper, Gambit Weekly, and in the Ms. blog. With Professor Barbara McCaskill, from the University of Georgia, I am preparing an annotated edition of the memoir Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed (1926) by the black Seattle-based evangelists Emma and Lloyd P. Ray for West Virginia University Press’s series called Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture.