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As a literary and cultural studies scholar, Maria is broadly interested in the violence of racial capitalism in US literatures and cultures. Her work primarily deals with how violence arises out of and impacts capitalist social relations and ideological production, especially as it relates to notions of selfhood, ownership, and state power across the long nineteenth century.

Right now, Maria is at work on her first book project, At All Costs: Extralegal Violence and Liberal Democracy in US Culture, which examines extralegal violence not as a lawless force that threatened US liberal-democratic governance but instead as emerging from and further entrenching the conditions that governance set.

Maria’s work appears or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Nineteenth-Century Literature, MELUS, and Studies in American Naturalism, and her edited collection Reading Confederate Monuments, winner of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s award for best edited collection of 2023, is available from the University Press of Mississippi.

Ph.D. in English, 2016
University of Connecticut

M.A. in English, 2012
University of Connecticut

B.A. in English (summa cum laude), 2010
University of Pittsburgh

• Early and nineteenth-century US, Black, and ethnic literatures and cultures
• Critical race and ethnic studies

• “The Violence of Economies of Dispossession in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends.” MELUS 49.3 (2024): 26–47.
• “Deferred Lynching and the Moral High Ground in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 73.1 (2018): 94–118.
• “Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Slave Narrative: Reading the Maps of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.” Callaloo 37.5 (2014): 1181–95.
• “Challenging Monumentality, Channeling Counter-Monumentality.” Conclusion. Reading Confederate Monuments. Ed. Maria Seger. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2022. 251–54.
• “How and Why to Read Confederate Monuments.” Introduction. Reading Confederate Monuments. Ed. Maria Seger. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2022. 3–18.
• “Redeeming White Women in/through Lost Cause Films.” Reading Confederate Monuments. Ed. Maria Seger. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2022. 142–65.

• Joseph P. Montiel and Board of Regents Support Fund (BORSF) Endowed Professorship in English, University of Louisiana at ɫ��AV, 2025–28
• Internal Speaker Research Grant, Flora Levy Humanities Series, University of Louisiana at ɫ��AV, 2025
• Outstanding Master’s Mentor Award, Graduate School, University of Louisiana at ɫ��AV, 2025
• Reginald Moore Travel Grant for Research in Activism and Social Justice, Woodson Research Center, Rice University, 2025
• Carolyn Dural Memorial Faculty Advising Award, College of Liberal Arts, University of Louisiana at ɫ��AV, 2025
• Outstanding Doctoral Mentor Award, Division of Research, Innovation, and Economic Development, University of Louisiana at ɫ��AV, 2025
• Louisiana Project Grant, Louisiana Division of the Arts, 2024–25
• Rebirth Grant, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2024–25
• Sustainable Development Research Award, University of Louisiana at ɫ��AV, 2024–25
• Best Edited Collection, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, 2023
• Founders’ Award for Humanities Teaching and Research, Friends of the Humanities, 2020
• Achievement Medal for Civilian Service, Department of the Army, 2017
• Predoctoral Fellowship, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Connecticut, 2016
• Connected Academics Proseminar Fellowship, Modern Language Association, 2015­–16
• Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Graduate School, University of Connecticut, 2015
• Predoctoral Fellowship, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Connecticut, 2015
• Aetna Graduate Critical Essay Second Prize, University of Connecticut, 2014
• Travel Grant, American Comparative Literature Association, 2014
• Aetna Graduate Critical Essay First Prize, University of Connecticut, 2012
• Graduate Student Travel Award, Northeast Modern Language Association, 2012

• Travel Grant, Institute for Constitutional History, New-York Historical Society, 2011