Dr. Judith Madera

Contact

• Email: maderaji@wfu.edu
• Office: C209 Tribble Hall
• Director: Dean Family Speaker Series

Degrees

• PhD  City University of New York Graduate Center
• MPhil  City University of New York Graduate Center
• BA  University of Connecticut (Philosophy and English)

Judith Madera specializes in African American and Caribbean literatures from the eighteenth century to present. At Wake Forest she teaches classes on the topics of race, critical place studies, and Pan-American intellectual history. She regularly offers seminars in contemporary environmental movements.

Madera is the author of Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth Century African American Literature (Duke, 2015) and is completing a long arc study of Black emancipatory politics and the radical geographical record that emerged through the abolition epoch.

She received her PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she was awarded the Melvin Dixon Prize for African American Studies. Her work has been supported by grants from Mellon/NEH and the Wake Forest Humanities Institute. She serves on steering committees for (RECAAL) Center for Research Engagement and Collaboration in African American Life, American Ethnic Studies, and the Social Science Research Seminar. International editorial advisory boards include the Journal of American Studies (Cambridge) and Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature (Brill).

Courses at Wake Forest

• ENG 770: US and Caribbean Literature
• ENG 361/ ENV 302  Liquid Landscapes: Designs, Networks, Stories  (Course site linked)
• ENG 702  Colony, Nation, Empire: Studies in Early American Literature
• ENG 341/741  Literature and the Environment
• ENG 387  Studies in African American Literature
• ENG 381  The Black Atlantic
• ENG 356  Literature of the Caribbean
• HON 285  Radical Ecologies
• WGS 320  Ecofeminism
• ENG 302  Literature and Ecology
• ENG 300  American Environments: Hemispheric American Literature and Theory
• ENG 175/ 275  Studies in American Literature
• WRI 111  Writing Seminar: Dreams and Presence

Selected Publications

• “Watershed and Place-Based Environmental Pedagogies” International Proceedings on Sustainable Energy Education, SEED EU (2024), Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain, Congress UPV, 2024:789-797  Madera and Phillips, D. https://www.seedconference.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/LDA-SEED2024-3.pdf
• “Shaking the Basemap” The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity. (Duke, 2023)
•  “Early Black Worldmaking: Body, Compass and Text.” American Literary History, 33(3) Fall 2021.
• “Quiet Empire and Slippery Geography: Puerto Rico as Non-Sovereign Territory.” JTAS: Journal of Transatlantic American Studies. Special Forum on American Territorialities. 11(1) 2020
• “The Birth of an Island: Revisiting Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 46, Spring 2017.
• “Moving Home” Review essay for ALH, Fall (2023); “Plagiarama!: William Wells Brown and the Aesthetics of Attraction,” ALH. Series X (2017)
• Book:  Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. (Duke, 2015)
• “Atlantic Architectures: Nineteenth-Century Cartography and Martin Delany” ELN: English Language Notes, Vol. 52, Issue 2 (2014) https://read.dukeupress.edu/english-language-notes/article/52/2/75/137000/Atlantic-Architectures-Nineteenth-Century.
• “Floating Prisons: Dispossession, Ordering, and Colonial Atlantic ‘States,’ 1776-1783” in Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America. eds. Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell. University of Georgia Press, 2012. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549034/summary
• “Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation” Journal of American History, Vol 95 No.4 (March 2009) 
• “The Standardized Curriculum and De-Localization: Obstacles to Critical Pedagogy.” (co-author with D.E. Mulcahy) Radical History Review, 102 (Fall 2008): 201-213.
• “American Heteroglossia: Open-Cell Regionalism and the New Orleans Short Fiction of Alice Dunbar Nelson.” Discourse, 29.1 (Winter 2007): 120-139.
• “James McCune Smith: The Communipaw Connection.” Nineteenth-Century Prose, Volume 31, Nos. 1 / 2 (Fall 2007): 349-358.
• “American Colonization” The World of Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895.  Eds. Paul Finkelman and L. Diane Barnes. New York: Oxford UP (2006)

Awards

• Reynolds Research Leave, Wake Forest University 9/22
• Office of Research and Sponsored Programs and WFU Humanities Institute College nominee: NEH summer stipend (The Shadow and the Compass) 9/19
• Grant for Scholarly Research, Endowed Faculty Funding (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)  6/18
• McCulloch Family Faculty Fellowship, Wake Forest University  2015-2018
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Mellon Engaged Humanities Development Award  1/18
• Wake Forest University Faculty of Impact Teaching Award, Office of the College of the Dean  4/14