Department of English

Susan Hegeman writes and researches in the area of North American literatures and cultures, especially of the 20th and 21st centuries. She has written extensively on literary and cultural modernism and on the history of American anthropology, and on topics related to Native American and Indigenous studies. A former chapter president of United Faculty of Florida, the faculty union, Dr. Hegeman also studies the history and politics of higher education in the United States. She is the author of the books Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton, 1999) and The Cultural Return (California, 2012), and is an associate editor of the multi-volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel (2011). Recent publications include “Human Rights and the Novel After UNDRIP: On Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy” College Literature 50.2-3 (Spring-Summer 2023) and “Arctic Pedagogy: Indigenous People and the MACOS Culture War” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association Issue 10.2 (fall, 2021). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled “Culture Wars: Institutions and the Crisis of Value.”

Dr. Hegeman regularly teaches undergraduate courses on Native American and First Nations Literature, Law and American Literature, and a course on theories and practices of value and evaluation. Recent graduate courses include “Theory After 2008” and “McCarthyism.” She plans to teach a graduate course in spring 2024 on “The Contemporary.”