Maria Seger

Maria Seger
  • Faculty
  • Associate Professor of English
  • Undergraduate Studies Coordinator

Biography

As a literary and cultural studies scholar, Maria is broadly interested in the violence of racial capitalism in US literatures and cultures. Her work primarily deals with how violence arises out of and impacts capitalist social relations and ideological production, especially as it relates to notions of selfhood, ownership, and state power across the long nineteenth century.

Right now, Maria is at work on her first book project, At All Costs: Extralegal Violence and Liberal Democracy in US Culture, which examines extralegal violence not as a lawless force that threatened US liberal-democratic governance but instead as emerging from and further entrenching the conditions that governance set.

Maria’s work appears or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Nineteenth-Century Literature, MELUS, and Studies in American Naturalism, and her edited collection Reading Confederate Monuments, winner of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s award for best edited collection of 2023, is available from the University Press of Mississippi.

Education

PhD, English, University of Connecticut, 2016
MA, English, University of Connecticut, 2012
BA, summa cum laude, English, University of Pittsburgh, 2010

Student Research/Collaboration

  • Early and nineteenth-century US, Black, and ethnic literatures and cultures
  • Critical race and ethnic studies