Caterine Ross Nickerson
Ph.D., American Studies, Yale University, 1991

Research Interests

While my teaching interests range through a number of topics within the study of American literature and culture since 1860, my own research centers on issues of narrative and the representation of mystery, crime, and violence. Those representations are never removed from the construction of ideologies of race, class, region, sexuality, and gender, and my work on detective fiction explores the way in the intricacies of narrative structure serve to express, and sometimes to consciously critique, these complex historical processes. In my ongoing project on Lizzie Borden (a wealthy Massachusetts woman accused in 1892 of murdering her father and stepmother), I am likewise concerned with understanding the fascination engendered by the case and the numerous re-tellings of it as matters of cultural history and collective story-telling.

I also have a strong interest in Asian American literature, and am part of the faculty and student working group working to establish and expand Asian Studies, including Asian American Studies at Emory.

Publications

• The Web of Iniquity: Patterns of Gender, Crime, and Narration in Detective Fiction by American Women, 1865-1935, Duke University Press, 1999. Nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
• 'The Cunning of Her Sex': The Rhetoric of Guilt, Innocence, and Gender in the Trial of Lizzie Borden," essay in Violence and American History, Michael Bellesiles, editor, forthcoming from New York University Press
• "Murder as Social Criticism," American Literary History, vol. 9, no. 4 (1997).
• "Serial Detection and Serial Killers in Twin Peaks," Literature/Film Quarterly 21 (1993): 271-76.
• Editor, That Affair Next Door and Lost Man's Lane by Anna Katherine Green, Duke University Press, 2003
• Editor, The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight by Metta Fuller Victor, Duke
  Univeristy Press, 2003

Projects

• Lizzie Borden and the Fascination of the Past (book).
• Selector, NEH funded Project to digitize Transatlantic Genre Fiction by Women, Emory Women Writers Project
• Sinophilia in America (book)

Courses
Winner of Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities, 1999, by Emory's Center for Teaching and Curriculum

Graduate Seminars

• Pedagogy
• Transatlantic Gothic
• American Studies Proseminer
• ILA First Year Writing Workshop
• Narratives of Violence
• The Historical Novel in 20th-Century America
• Introduction to Violence Studies

Undergraduate

• Representation of Asian America
• American Identities
• Asian American Literature
• Introduction to American Studies
• Popular Literature
• Women, Crime and US History
• Crime Writing American Culture in the 1950s