Cynthia Franklin

In both my teaching and research, I am interested in contemporary works--primarily but not exclusively written in the U.S.--that challenge genre boundaries, and that engage issues in feminist theory, ethnic studies, and cultural studies. Courses that I have taught explore topics including: the contemporary detective novel; the humanities and human rights; contemporary autobiography; memoir and disability; gender and sexuality; love and terror; American literary history; contemporary literary theory; education and culture; multi-genre women's literature; and contemporary minority literature.

I am the author of Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today (2009) and Writing Women's Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies (1997). Essays and review articles appear in the journals American Quarterly, Biography, Hitting Critical Mass, Life Writing, LIT, MELUS, The Contemporary Pacific, and in Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating's This Bridge We Call Home. "The Art of Breathing, and Other Everyday Revolutionary Practices," my introduction to Fred Ho's Diary of a Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the Cellular Level, will appear in fall 2011, and I am currently at work on a project tentatively entitled "Eichmann's Ghosts and Uncivil Professors in an Age of Empire."

A significant part of my work is collaborative. I am the co-editor of Navigating Islands and Continents: Conversations and Contestations in and around the Pacific,and Re-Placing American Literature: Conversations and Contestations. With my colleague Laura Lyons, I co-edited a special issue of Biography, "Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing." In that issue appears our introduction, "Bodies of Evidence and the Intricate Machines of Untruth," and our interviews with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Haunani-Kay Trask. I also have collaborated with Laura Lyons on articles entitled "Remixing Hybridity: Globalization, Native Resistance, and Cultural Production in Hawaii" (in American Studies and Acoma), "From Grief to Grievance: Ethics and Politics in the Testimony of Anti-War Mothers" (in Life Writingand Trauma Texts), and "The Evidentiary Power of Grief: Family Testimony and Human Rights." I am co-editor, with Miriam Fuchs, of another special issue of Biography, "Translating Lives."

I am co-editor of the journal Biography with Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes; am co- advisor for the Comparativism and Translation in Literary and Cultural Studies (CTLCS) Research Cluster; and am on the Coordinating Council for the Center on Disability Studies. I have served as Director of the Honors Program in English and on the International Cultural Studies Program Steering Committee, and have been active in campus-wide organizations including the University Peace Initiative and PO‘E.