Literature: nineteenth-century American literature; gender and sexuality studies; research methods; queer theory
Samaine Lockwood specializes in American literature and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on a book called Tituba: The History of an American Cultural Figure in which she examines how Tituba, one of the first women to be accused of witchcraft during the 1692-93 Salem witch hunt, has been represented over hundreds of years of American culture. Tituba, who was enslaved, was most likely an Indigenous woman, but she has been represented as a Black or biracial (Black and Indigenous) woman since the end of the Civil War. Samaine is interested in how American writers, especially White and Black women writers, have returned to the Salem witch trials and Tituba time and again to think through Black and White women's citizenship, sexuality, and so-called criminality as well as the varied roles colonial women, Black, White, and Indigenous, play in our founding national and hemispheric narratives. Samaine's first book, Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism, was published by UNC Press in 2015, and she has published on china collecting, colonial revivalism, nineteenth-century Americans' obsession with Vikings, queer critical regionalism, and New England regionalism in relation to the African American literary tradition.
Samaine has served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English Department for eight years, during which time she led the redesign of the English major curriculum in addition to working on access initiatives (ADVANCE), general education design (Mason Core), assessment, and recruitment. She is currently working on a team of English professors who are revising a key piece of the literature curriculum with the support of an inclusive excellence curriculum enhancement grant from CHSS. She serves as the point person in English for state-wide conversations about transfer equivalency initiatives such as TransferVA. She has training in DL course design and offers courses in face-to-face, hybrid, and asynchronous online modalities. Samaine is passionate about providing every student with not only access to quality higher education but access to the transformative experience of creating new knowledge. She was recently awarded an OSCAR Mentoring Excellence Award for her commitment to mentoring undergraduates in pursuing original research and creative projects.
“Queer Critical Regionalism.” The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, edited by Siobhan Somerville, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 228-240.
"Normands cosmopolites dans la Nouvelle-Angleterre régionaliste de Sarah Orne Jewett." Romantisme 181 (2018): 73-84.
Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Colonial Revival." Legacy 29.1 (2012): 86-114.
"Shopping for the Nation: Women's China Collecting in Late-Nineteenth-Century New England." The New England Quarterly 81.1 (2008): 63-90.
HERS Leadership Institute | Philadelphia | 2022
University of California, Davis | Ph.D. in English | 2006
University of Michigan | M.A. in English Language and Literature | 1997
Vassar College | B.A. in English and History | 1992