Nancy Von Rosk

Bio

Professor Von Rosk came to Mount Saint Mary College in January 2005 after teaching at the University of New Hampshire where she had earned her Ph.D.

Prior to becoming a college teacher, Professor Von Rosk taught in a variety of institutions and programs at the secondary level including The Casablanca American School in Morocco, and Project Advance, a program for highly-motivated inner-city high school students at Boston University. Her dissertation, "Private Lives and Public Spectacles: The Urban Novel and Cultural Transformation, 1852-1925" examines the beginnings of urbanization and consumer culture in America, and writers' responses to the cultural shifts of their time.

While much of her expertise is in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature, Professor Von Rosk's scholarly and teaching interests range widely. She has published on contemporary postcolonial and Native American writers and teaches a creative writing course on the Art of Memoir. Her work can be found in various scholarly journals and anthologies including Studies in the Novel, An Inn Near Kyoto: Writing by American Women Abroad, Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, and Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.

Most recently, Professor Von Rosk’s scholarship has focused on the literature of the Jazz Age as well as women writers and the gothic. She is the editor of the volume, Looking Back at the Jazz Age: New Essays on the Literature and Legacy of an Iconic Decade(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016) and is currently researching and writing on the ghost stories of Edith Wharton.

Degrees
Ph.D. University of New Hampshire
M.A.  Northeastern University
B.A.  SUNY Oneonta

Courses
College Writing
American Literature 1
Introduction to Literary Analysis
Senior Capstone Seminar: "The Gothic Imagination" 

Specializations / Areas of Interest
Edith Wharton
The Jazz Age
Women Writers
Memoir and Creative Nonfiction
19th and 20th Century American Literature

Memberships and Professional Associations
Edith Wharton Society
Modern Language Association
Society for the Study of American Women Writers

Publications

• "A Writerly Communion: Browning, Balzac and Catholicism in Edith Wharton's 'The Duchess at Prayer.'" Re-Reading the Age of Innovation: Victorians, Moderns and Literary Newness. Louise Kane, ed. London: Routledge, 2022. 158-171.
• "'Granite Outcroppings but Half-Emerged from the Soil': Using Ethan Frome in a Gateway Course for the English Major." Teaching Edith Wharton's Major Novels and Short Fiction. Ferda Asya, ed. Palgrave Macmillan, May 2021. 145-162.
• "Women, Work and Cross-Class Alliances in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Working Women in American Literature, 1865-1950. Miriam Gogol ed. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. 69-91.
• Looking Back at the Jazz Age: New Essays on the Literature and Legacy of an Iconic Decade. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
• “Prince Charming or Animal Bridegroom?: Fairy Tale Elements in Edith Wharton’s Bunner Sisters.” Journal of the Short Story in English Special Issue: The Short Stories of Edith Wharton. No.58. Spring, 2012. 159-171.
• “’To Dance with the Hired Girls’: Love, Labor and Longing in My Antonia.” Women and Work: The Labor of Self-Fashioning. Ed. Christine Mower and Susanne Weil. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 227-242.
• “Mark Twain’s Messengers for a Fallen World: Supernatural Strangers in The War Prayer and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts.” Mark Twain Studies, Volume 2 (October 2006): 84-86.
• “Race, Urban Culture and the Naturalist Vision in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods.” Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism, ed. Mary Papke. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 144-168.
• “‘Exhuming Buried Cries’ in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Volume 34, issue 4 (December 2001): 65-84.
• “Spectacular Homes and Pastoral Theaters: Gender, Urbanity, and Domesticity in The House of Mirth.” Studies in the Novel, Volume 33, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 322-350.
• “‘Go, Make Yourself for a Person’: Urbanity and the Construction of an American Identity in the Novels of Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Volume 26 (2001): 295-335.
• “In and Out of the Labyrinth: A Journey Through Fes.” An Inn Near Kyoto: Writing by American Women Abroad. ed. Kathleen Coskran and C. W. Truesdale. Minneapolis: New Rivers Press, 1998. 41-45.
• “Returning and Remembering: The Recovery of the Maternal in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony.” Southwestern American Literature. Volume 22, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 33-48.

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