Nicole Tonkovich

Ph.D. (University of Utah)

Professor of American Literature

Primary Office: LIT 446
Primary Phone: (858) 534-5754
Quarterly Office Hours

Email: ntonkovich@ucsd.edu

Website: Nineteenth-century Women at Work

Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award Winner, 2013

My research interests center around nineteenth-century cultural productions by American women. I have researched and published works about women’s education in the nineteenth century, and about women who have produced texts in nonfictional forms: journalism, advice writing, household manuals, diaries and scrapbooks, and anthropological monographs. Most recently, my work has focused on two late-nineteenth-century women, Alice C. Fletcher, an anthropologist, and E. Jane Gay, a photographer, who worked among the Nez Perces in northwest Idaho. I served as editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers from 2006-2013. An admitted archive rat, I am firmly committed to establishing the historical backgrounds and ideological aims of all kinds of writing.

I teach classes in early to mid-nineteenth century US literatures and cultures and have taught specialized courses in literature and photography, in the captivity narrative, in American Gothic, and in the history and culture of USAmerican westward expansion. I would describe my classroom teaching style as friendly and interactive, and I welcome student participation. Recently I was selected by the Committee on Senate Awards as a recipient of the 2012/13 Distinguished Teaching Award for Academic Senate Members.

Books:

The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012.

Trading Gazes: Anglo-American Women Photographers among North American Indians. With Melody Graulich, Lisa MacFarlane, and Susan Bernardin. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003.

Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah Josepha Hale, Fanny Fern and Margaret Fuller. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997.

The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012.

Trading Gazes: Anglo-American Women Photographers among North American Indians. With Melody Graulich, Lisa MacFarlane, and Susan Bernardin. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003.

Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah Josepha Hale, Fanny Fern and Margaret Fuller. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997.

Editions:

Elder Northfield's Home; or, Sacrificed on the Mormon Altar. By A. Jennie Bartlett. 1882. Forthcoming, U of Nebraska P, 2014.

The American Woman's Home. By Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1869. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002.

Archival Catalogs:

The E. Jane Gay Photograph Collection (Accession 63-221). Idaho State Historical Society and Archives, Boise, Idaho. Forthcoming, 2015.

The Papers of Corbett Lawyer and Mylie Lawyer (Accession 632). Nez Perce National Historical Park Archives, 2006.

Selected Essays:

"Parallax, Transit, Transmotion: Reading Race in the Allotment Photographs of E. Jane Gay." MELUS special issue on Visual Culture and Race. Forthcoming, 2014.

"Who Put the Gun into the Whore’s Hand?: Disability in Deadwood." In Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern. Ed. Nicolas Witschi and Melody Graulich. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012.

"At Cross Purposes: Church, State, and Sex in Mary Austin's Isidro." Exploring the Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin. Ed. Melody Graulich and Betsy Klimasmith. Reno: U of Nevada P, 1999. 1-20.

"Genealogy, Genre, Gender: Edith Maude Eaton's 'Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian.'" Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing a Multicultural Sense of "American" Identity. Ed. Timothy Powell. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999. 236-60.

"Guardian Angels, Missing Mothers, and Western Fictions: Race and Domesticity in Winona and Deadwood Dick on Deck." Western American Literature 32.1 (1997): 240-64.

"Writing in Circles: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Semi-Colon Club, and the Construction of Women's Authorship." in Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Ed. Catherine Hobbs. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995. 147-75.

"An Excess of Recompense: The Feminine Economy of The Mother's Recompense." American Literary Realism 26.3 (1994): 12-32.

"Traveling in the West, Writing in the Library: Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes." Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers 10.2 (1993): 79-102.

"Rhetorical Power in the Victorian Parlor: Godey's Lady's Book and the Gendering of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric." in Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Essays on the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric. Ed. S. Michael Halloran and Gregory C. Clark. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 158-83.