Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture

Contributors

Contributors Margot Gayle Backus is an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston. Her articles have appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literatllre, American Imago, the Canadian Review ofComparative Literature, Cultural Critique , the Journal of Homosexuality, and Signs. She is also the author of The Gothic Family Romance: Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Anglo-Irish Settler Colonial Order (Duke University Press, 1999). Julie Berebitsky is a visiting professor of history and the director of women's studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture ofMotherhood, 18511950 (University Press of Kansas, 2000). Claudia Castaneda is a Lecturer at the Centre for Science Studies and the Institute for Women's Studies, Lancaster University, U.K. Her work lies at the intersection of postcolonial, feminist, and science and technology studies. She is the author of Worlds in the Making (Duke University Press, forthcoming), which considers embodied figurations of the child in transnational circuits of exchange . Beverly Lyon Clark teaches English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Her previous work includes Talking about Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1985), Lewis Carroll (Starmont, 1990), and Regendering the School Story (Garland , 1996), and she coedited "Little Women" and the Feminist Imagination (Garland, 1999), and Girls, Boys, Books, Toys (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). She is currently completing Kiddie Lit, a book on the cultural construction of children's literature in the United States. Beverly Crockett is a lecturer in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Northwestern University. The essay in this volume developed out of research on her Ph.D. dissertation in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Jill R. Deans is an assistant professor ofEnglish at Kansas State University, where she teaches twentieth-century American literature, ethnic literature, women's literature, and film. Having completed her Ph.D. dissertation (at the University ofMassachusetts,Amherst) on adoption and the rhetoric ofillegitimacy, she has since published several articles on adoption in late-twentieth-centuryAmerican cultural texts. 305 306 Contributors Paris De Soto is an English teacher at Los Gatos High School in California. She is working toward her Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. The essay in this volume is part of her dissertation. Kristina Fagan is a doctoral student in English at the University ofToronto. Her dissertation is entitled "Laughing to Survive: The Comic Spirit in Contemporary Canadian Native Literature." Nancy K. Gish is a professor of English and women's studies at the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of Time in the Poetry ofT. S. Eliot (Macmillan , 1981), Hugh MacDiarmid: The Man and His Work (Macmillan, 1984), The Waste Land: A Poem ofMemory and Desire (Twayne, 1988), and Hugh MacDiarmid : Man and Poet (National Poetry Foundation and Edinburgh University Press, 1992), as well as articles on Marianne Moore, Denise Levertov, and contemporary Scottish women poets. She is currently coediting an anthology on gender, sexuality, and desire in T. S. Eliot. Garry Leonard is an associate professor ofEnglish at the University ofToronto. He is the author of Rereading Dubliners: A Lacanian Perspective (Syracuse University Press, 1993) and Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (University Presses of Florida, 1998), as well as numerous articles on modernism, cinema, and popular culture, published in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Novel, American Imago, and College Literature. He is currently writing a book called Makillg it New: Technology and Subjectivity in Modernism and Modernity. Judith Modell received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Minnesota in 1978. She is currently a professor of anthropology, history, and art at Carnegie Mellon University, where she has been teaching since 1984. Her publications include Ruth Benedict (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Kinship with Strangers (University of California Press, 1994); A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); and A Sealed and Secret Kinship (Berghahn Press, forthcoming March 2001), which deals with changes in American adoption and the way those changes come about. Marianne Novy is a professor of English and women's studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (University of North Carolina Press, 1984) and Engaging with Shakespeare : Responses of George Eliot and Other Women Novelists (University of Georgia Press, 1994; rpt. University of Iowa Press, 1998) and has edited three anthologies on women's responses to Shakespeare: Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare (University ofIllinois Press, 1990), Cross-Cultural Performances (University...