women and gender studies – Faculty

Maddie Wolfert

Maddie Wolfert — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:08:09 +0000

Madison R. Wolfert is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at �ֲ��ý College. Prof. Wolfert’s research expertise includes early modern English literature, early modern political theory, trans studies, and critical race studies. Wolfert’s book project, The Use of Sex: Literature and Empire Before Cisness, examines representations of gender and racial difference in seventeenth-century transatlantic literatures and intellectual histories. In the wake of recent right-wing attempts to frame trans life as an inherent threat to the state, this project reads colonial archives, transatlantic literatures, and transmissions of the Adam and Eve story as sites for the regulation of sex difference and sex change before the linguistic creation of “cis” and “trans.” The Use of Sex brings major authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Locke into conversation with writers who have receded from modern attention to argue that a racialized hermeneutics of sex difference is central to literary representations of Atlantic colonialism and imperial ideology.

Prof. Wolfert was recently awarded the Laura McAllister Dissertation Prize in Early Trans Studies and was previously the recipient of a Fulbright Grant for English Teaching Assistantship in Germany.

At �ֲ��ý, Prof. Wolfert teaches courses on early modern literature, including Shakespeare.

I am excited to work with students who are interested in early modern literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, trans studies, and science fiction!

Melinda A. Plastas

mplastas — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:25:10 +0000

Melinda Plastas is an Associate Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include race and social movements, gender and militarization, health justice,�� tobacco capitalism, art and resistance. Plastas is the author of the book

At �ֲ��ý, Plastas teaches courses and advises theses for American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and History. Plastas also currently heads the program in American Studies and previously chaired the program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Selected Publications

Review: Laura E. Helton, “Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History.” Journal of American History, Volume 112, Issue 2, September 2025, Pages 374–376.

Review: Wiegand and Shirley A Wiegand, “The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism.” Journal of American History, March, 2019, 105(4): 1085-86.

Review: Sarah L. Silkey, “Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism.” Journal of American History, September 1, 2016, 103(2): 483-483.

“Contemplating Tobacco,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol 12, No. 2 (2016), ISSN: 1557-2935

Guest editor with Maria Rentetzi, “ Special Issue of Advances in Historical Studies, Vol 5, No 2, April 2016.��

Melinda Plastas and Eve Raimon, Special Issue: James Baldwin, African American Review, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2013, 687-699.

Melinda Plastas and Lisa Botshon,,” Feminist Teacher, Volume 20, No 1, 2009, 1-14.

“A Different Burden: Race and the Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch,” Peace and Change, October 2008, Volume 33, Issue 4, 469-506

Plastas has been active in numerous Maine organizations including and the .��

Expertise

S ocial movements, African American history, Cultural studies, Black Feminisms, critical race theory,�� Gender and Sexuality studies, health justice, commodities studies, Peace studies, transnationalism, tobacco capitalism, art and resistance.

Eden K. Osucha

Eden Osucha — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:25:08 +0000

Prof. Osucha’s areas of research expertise include Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture, African American Studies, Legal Studies, Critical Race Studies, Visual Culture, Queer Studies, and Feminist Theory. Her book manuscript, The Post-Racial Past: Race, Privacy and Identity Before the Obama Era, examines historical productions of the discourse commonly called “the post-racial” prior to the twenty-first century, at the intersections of law, literature, and media culture. The Post-Racial Past argues that contemporary post-racialism originates in the legal history of “privacy,” which Prof. Osucha traces beyond the formal recognition of a right to privacy in constitutional law to antebellum slave law that regarded the sovereignty of slave masters as a natural right rooted in the master-slave relation’s “private” nature. Through linked analyses of literary works and legal writing–including Supreme Court opinions, statutory laws, and legal scholarship–and visual texts from cinema and television to nineteenth-century commercial media, The Post-Racial Past argues that the legal right to privacy’s development via racialized technologies of publicity, surveillance, and sexuality made broader discourses of race, privacy, and identity increasingly enmeshed and conceptually interdependent. Exploring the acute racialization of a rights claim overtly linked, throughout its history, to gendered and sexuality-based identity claim, the book demonstrates how legal privacy anticipated, rehearsed, and consolidated post-racialism prior to its becoming, at the start of the Obama Era, a dominant ideology still pervasive within the political and cultural contradictions of American racism in the present.

Prof. Osucha has served on the faculty steering committees of the Programs in American Cultural Studies and African American Studies and has also served as a member of the Program Committee for Gender and Sexuality Studies and was a founding member of the college’s Arts Collaborative. Recent public humanities work includes serving as lead project scholar to develop the program which examines legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment for the nation’s literary history, for the Maine Humanities Council’s public libraries’ reading groups project, and co-curator of featuring short documentary and experimental films created as artistic responses to 9/11, which Prof. Osucha developed for Portland, Maine’s SPACE Gallery.

Recent publications:

Carol Batker, Eden Osucha, and Augusta Rohrbach, “Introduction: Critical Pedagogies for a Changing World.” American Literature 1 June 2017; 89 (2): 213–223.

Awards

Prof. Osucha’s awards and honors include the Mrs. Giles Whiting Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, administered by the �ֲ��ý College Office of the Dean of Faculty, the Nancy L. Buc Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowships Program, administered by the National Research Council of the National Academies.

Literary Arts Live

A published poet and creative writing teacher, Prof. Osucha is one of the curators of the English Department’s Literary Arts Live reading series, which brings poets, novelists, and creative non-fiction writers to campus to give public readings and serve as guest instructors in the department’s creative writing program. Visiting writers whose visits Professor Osucha has personally arranged include: Emily Barton,��C.A. Conrad, Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Gabriel Gudding, James Hannaham, Courtney Eldridge, Samantha Hunt, Caroline Knox, Dorothea Lasky, Sarah Manguso, Ander Monson,��Tessa Joseph-Nicholas, Paul LaFarge, Dinaw Mengestu, Brian Kim Stefans,��Christopher Vitiello, Colson Whitehead, Dara Wier, and Magdalena Zurawski.

Recent courses:

Eng 105. “Narrating 9/11 in Literature and Film”
Eng 142. “Early American Literature”
Eng143. “Nineteenth-Century American Literature”
Eng 241. “U.S. Fiction”
Eng 292. “Poetry Writing”
GSS 248. “Queer Studies”
ACEN 395b. “Privacy, Intimacy, and Identity: American Selfhood from the Puritan ‘Soul’ to Facebook”
ACEN 395c. “Frontier and Border in U.S. Literature and Culture: Chican@ and Native American Literatures and Cultural Theory.”