LuElla D'Amico

Dr. LuElla D'Amico is an Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies program . Her primary research interests lie in girlhood and girl culture in early and nineteenth-century American literature, and she has published articles in Girlhood Studies, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Children's Literature in Education, and the collection Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature Before 1900, among other venues. She also has edited a volume about the history of girls’ series books in the U.S. titled Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture, and is co-editor of Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century. Dr. D’Amico currently serves as President of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society and is the “Year in Conferences” director for ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture.

Oklahoma State University
PhD in English

College of Charleston and The Citadel, Joint Program
MA in English

College of Charleston, South Carolina
BA in English

Minors: Women’s Studies, Philosophy, Creative Writing

• Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century. Co-Edited with Robin Cadwallader. (2020)
• Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture. Editor. Lexington Books, a Division of Rowman & Littlefield. Spring 2016

• “‘Who Cares?': Caritas and the Case for Christian Naturalism in Rebecca Harding Davis’ Short Story ‘The Promise Of the Dawn’ (1863)” Literature and Belief (Forthcoming)
• “The Archetypal Girl Savior the and Child Theologian: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva and Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theology. Eds. Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Routledge (Forthcoming)
• “‘Little Women’ in a Transatlantic World.’” Co-Written with Robin Cadwallader, Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth-Century, Routledge, 2020
• “A Swiss-American Merger: Reading Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881) Within and Beyond the Canon of Nineteenth-Century American Sentimental Fiction.” Co-Written with Tanja Stampfl, Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century, Routledge, 2020
• “Just a Little Bestselling Series: An Introduction to the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s Honey Bunch Series.” The Sweet Public Domain: Celebrating Copyright Expiration with Honey Bunch. Eds. Sara Benson and Kayla Dwyer, Windsor and Downs Press, February 2020, https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/scalar/thesweetpublicdomain/about-the-series
• “The Journey to American Womanhood: Travel and Feminist Christian Rebellion in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Martha Finley’s Elsie’s Girlhood.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Spring 2019
• “What Would Elsie Do?: The Intersection of Moral and Academic Education in Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore Series” Children’s Literature in Education, Spring 2018 (Reprinted Spring 2020)
• “James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Scholastic: The Potency of Cross-Cultural Friendship in Historical Fiction about Early America.” Historical Fiction: A Critical Volume. Ed. Virginia Brackett, Salem Press, 2018
• “The Soundtrack of Charlotte Temple: Teaching Sympathy in the Early American Novel through Popular Music.” Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, Summer 2017
• “Finding God’s Way: Amelia Johnson’s Clarence and Corrine as a Message of Religious Resistance for African-American Children.” Early African-American Children’s Literature. Eds. Anna Mae Duane and Katharine Capshaw Smith, University of Minnesota Press, 2017
• “Disciplining Bad Girls: 300 Years of Trying Anne Bonny and Mary Read.” The Nautilus: A Maritime Journal of Literature, History, and Culture, Spring 2014
• “‘The Baby Became Horrible’: The Traumatized Adolescent Mother in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ 1870 Hedged In.” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative Special Issue: “Histories of Motherhood,” Summer 2014
• “Possessed By Silence: Cotton Mather, Mercy Short, and the Origin of America’s Mean Girls.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Winter 2012

"Year in Conferences: 2018" and "2019" ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

Recent Conference Presentations

• “Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife.” American Academy of Religion, Virtual Conference, December 2020
• “Racialized Genders Seminar: Journeying Between Girlhood and Motherhood in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Virtual Conference, March 2020
• “‘The Ancestor to Every Action is Thought’: Service-Learning and Catholic Social Teaching in a Transcendentalism Course.” Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, Conference, Sacramento, CA, June 2019
• “‘Who cares?’: Caritas as Salve for the Adolescent Mother in Rebecca Harding Davis’ ‘The Promise of the Dawn’ (1863) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' Hedged In (1870).” American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, May 2019

Roundtable Participant

• “Today’s Academic Job Market in American Literature: Strategies and Considerations.” American Literature Association, Boston, MA, May 2019
• “‘If You are a Good Girl in School’: The Politics of Common School Reform in Martha Finley’s Nineteenth-Century Elsie Dinsmore Series,” Society for the Study of American Women Writers, Denver, CO, November 2018

• President of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society: www.stowesociety.org
• C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
• The Society of Early Americanists
• The Society for the Study of American Women Writers
• The Children's Literature Association
• The American Academy of Religion

Dr. D'Amico is a joyful Catholic who spends most of her time with her two young children, Jack and Emmeline, and her husband, Scott. She loves reading mystery novels in her spare time, checking out used bookstores, drinking diet coke, traveling, and watching football.

Dr. D'Amico was nominated for the Presidential Teaching Award at UIW. She was also awarded a Faculty Endowment Research Award for her work about transatlantic girlhood.

Dr. D'Amico serves on the advisory board for Lexington Books' Children and Youth in Popular Culture Series and is on the editorial board of Red Feather Journal: An International Journal of Children in Popular Culture.

• Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
• Girlhood Studies
• Women's Writing
• Transatlanticism
• Children's and Young Adult Literature
• Multi-Ethnic Literature
• Feminist Theory
• Christianity and Literature

• Composition
• World Literature
• Early American Literature Survey
• Tomboys in American Literature and Film
• Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies
• Sentimentalism
• Literary Theory
• Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
• The American Novel to 1900
• Children's and Young Adult Literature
• Early American Outlaw Literature
• American Women's Writing
• Popular Culture