Melissa Lingle-Martin
Melissa Lingle-Martin
Assistant Professor
Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture ~ Women Writers ~ African-American Literature ~ Visual Culture ~ Law and Literature
Melissa Lingle-Martin, Ph.D., joined Mason Korea as an Assistant Professor of English in the fall of 2025. A specialist in the literature and culture of early and nineteenth-century America, Melissa has published and presented on women writers, visual culture, African-American literature, commemoration, composition, and pedagogy. She has also explored these topics and more with students in the United States, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Austria, and now South Korea.
Current Research
Melissa’s current book project examines how the texts of several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women writers engage with and sometimes challenge traditional commemorative practices. For this book, Melissa is also designing a digital companion site, Mapping More (Than) Monuments, which will juxtapose the women’s texts with images of existent and former monuments to expand notions of commemorative space and raise awareness about representational injustice.
As this project suggests, Melissa is committed to preserving the past with an eye to the future, and she pursues this work as a member of the Steering Committee of the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers, which encourages the use of digital tools in the rediscovery and recontextualization of neglected voices and visions.
Selected Publications
“Seeing ‘a True and Just Account’: Incidents and Visual Culture.” Approaches to Teaching Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. Lynn Domina. Modern Language Association (MLA) Approaches to Teaching Series. 2024. 175-182.
“Iconoclasm, Parody, and the Provocations of Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 31.2 (2014): 207-235.
Review of Teaching Law and Literature. Edited by Austin Sarat, Cathrine O. Frank, and Matthew Anderson. Studies in the Humanities 39-40.1-2 (2012-2013): 306-11.
Education
Melissa received her Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, her MA in Literature from the University of New Hampshire, and her BA in English and French from Grove City College.
Recent Presentations
"The 'earnest' and 'restless eye of Agitation' and Monumental Vision in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 'The Triumph of Freedom–A Dream'” Harper 200th Anniversary Symposium. Penn State University. State College, PA. 2025
“Monumental Women and the Transtemporal Strivings of American Studies.” Austrian Association for American Studies Annual Conference. Pädagogische Hochschule Vorarlberg. Feldkirch, Austria. 2024.
“Digital Tools for Teaching Workshop.” Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Conference. Baltimore, MD. 2021.
“‘Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write’: Phillis Wheatley, Intermediality, and Commemorative Culture.” Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference. Macon, GA. 2020.
“Mapping More (Than) Monuments: A Call for Conversation and Collaboration.” Triangle Digital Humanities Institute. North Carolina Central University. Durham, NC. 2019.
“Resisting and Recovering Images: Sedgwick’s Cultivation of Critical Vision.” Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Conference. Denver, CO. 2018.
“Looking for Lady Justice: Iconoclasm and Visionary Justice in Women’s Writing of the Civil War Era.” British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Symposium. University of Exeter. Exeter, UK. 2017.
“Investigating and Exhibiting Citizenship.” Teaching Roundtable. Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society. American Literature Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA. 2016.
“Harriet Jacobs’s Iconoclastic Challenge to the Optics of Injustice.” African American Literature and Culture Society Panel. American Literature Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA. 2016.
“The Mobility and Instability of Images in the Civil War Era: Jacobs, Lincoln, and Blythe.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference. Georgia Tech. Atlanta, GA. 2015.