Assoc. Professor Maureen Montgomery
Qualifications
- BA (Hons) (Warwick)
- PhD (East Anglia)
Room
Room 503, History Building
Contact Details
Phone: +64 3 3642488 ext. 6488
maureen.montgomery@canterbury.ac.nz
Postal address
American Studies Programme
School of Humanities
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch 8140
New Zealand
Office Hours: Tue 2.30-3.30 pm or by appointment
Research Interests
My first book, “Gilded Prostition:” Money, Migration and Marriage, 1870-1914 (Routledge, 1989) was a study of transatlantic relations and culture focusing on American women who married into the British peerage. I followed this up with a study of American women in the bourgeois elite, concentrating on New York City and drawing upon the fiction of Edith Wharton, entitled Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York (Routledge, 1998). My current book project, Whiteness and Politeness: The Racialization of Civilization, 1880-1930, is another venture into the cultural history of the period and examines travel literature, etiquette manuals, and novels of manners as a way of understanding how the American bourgeois elite conceptualized national identity at a time of fraught racial tensions.
Recent Publications
“Leisured Lives.” In Laura Rattray, ed., Edith Wharton in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming 2012.
“‘Natural Distinction’: The American Bourgeois Search for Distinctive Signs in Europe.” In Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum, eds., Distinction and Identity: Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp.31-51.
“‘Keep the American very eagle very quiet . . . when travelling in foreign countries:’ Race, Nation and Civilization in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 29 (2010): 73-95.
“Edith Wharton: Narrating the Past.” Edith Wharton Review. 26 (2010): 11-15.
“‘Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar’: American Divorcées and Transatlantic Encounters in Henry James’ ‘The Siege of London’ and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.” In Jerzy Kutnik & Artur Blaim, eds., Zeszyry Navkowe Wyższa Szkoła Społeczno-Przyrodniczegw Wblirie, 2007. Vol. 4. Pp. 37-56.
“‘A Degree in Bullying and Self-interest? No Thanks!’: the Branding of American Studies.” In Raili Poldsaar and Krista Vogelberg, eds., North America: Tensions and (Re)Solutions: Selected Proceedings of the 7th International Tartu Conference on North-American Studies. Cultural Studies Series 4, Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2007. Pp.128-40.
“From Descent to Consent: New Zealand’s Search for Identity.” In Rob Kroes, ed., Straddling Borders: The American Resonance in Transnational Identities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies, 2004. Pp.100-14.
“‘America the Beautiful:’ Patriotism and the Politics of Dissent in Bush’s America.” In Peter Bastian and Jan Pilditch, eds., The End of the American Century? Sydney: Fulbright New Zealand with ANZASA, 2004. Pp.27-43.
“Madame C.J. Walker.” Encyclopaedia of the Harlem Renaissance. 2 vols. Edited by Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp.1223-24.
“American Studies in the Post-Historical University.” Symposium on the Future of American Studies. Australasian Journal of American Studies 22 (2003):81-96.
“Dialogues in Dire Straits: Transnational and Transdisciplinary American Studies in the Post-Historical University.” In Raili Poldsaar and Krista Vogelberg, eds., Points of Convergence: Selected Proceedings of the 5th International Tartu Conference on North-American Studies. Cultural Studies Series 4, Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2003. Pp.106-121.
“An Overview of the Life and Career of Edith Wharton.” In Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 129, edited by Scott Darga and Linda Pavlovski. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2003.
“The Savagery of Civility: The Rhetoric of Civilization in the Wake of September 11th.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 21 (2002):56-65.
“Transculturations: American Studies in a Globalizing World—The Globalizing World in American Studies.” Amerikastudien 47 (2002): 115-19 (97-119). Co-authored with G. Lenz, A. Hornung, M. Notoji, B. Tucker, and A. Winkler.
Teaching
AMST 115 Selling the American Dream: Brand USA © and the Global Marketplace
AMST 127 American History (also coded as HIST 127)
AMST 140 Ethnicity and Identity (Not offered in 2012)
AMST 215 American Images and Frames of Reference
AMST 231 African American Women Writers / AMST 311 African American Women Writers (also coded as ENGL 251 and CULT 304)
AMST 242 War and the American Historical Memory / AMST 342 War and the American Historical Memory (also coded as HIST 242 and HIST 342)
AMST 436 American Identities: Fiction and Autobiography (also coded as CULT 409)
Supervision
My specialist areas are gender and ethnicity, particularly in the period 1870-1930. I have a particular interest in the interface between history and fiction, and on topics dealing with travel, migration, memory and identity.
Background
I was born in London of Irish parents who emigrated to Australia (leaving me behind—to finish my PhD). I studied History and Comparative American Studies at Warwick for my undergraduate degree, which included a year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then went to of East Anglia for my doctorate. I taught in the School of American and English Studies at both the University of East Anglia and the University of Sussex before being appointed as a Lecturer in American Studies at the West London Institute of Higher Education (underneath the flight path to Heathrow). I fled Thatcher’s Britain in 1986, taking up my position in American Studies at Canterbury.