Education
Ph.D., American Studies, Purdue University, 1999
About
Anne Boyd Rioux has been teaching at UNO since the Fall of 1999. She is a member of the Women's and Gender Studies faculty and teaches courses in American literature, with an emphasis on the 19th century, cultural studies, and gender. She is a two-time National Endowment of Humanities Fellow, once for Public Scholarship.
Selected Publications
Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (W. W. Norton, 2016). Named one of the ten best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune. Reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review; "Editor's Choice," New York Times; Editor's Pick, Library Journal; Starred Reviews in Booklist and Library Journal; A "Hot Book" at The National Book Review; A Book Making News at Lit Hub; and one of the BBC's ten books to read in February 2016. Also reviewed in the, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.
Editor, "Miss Grief" and Other Stories, by Constance Fenimore Woolson (W. W. Norton, 2016).
"The Diminution of Women Writers: An American Tradition," Lit Hub, May 12, 2016.
"Erased From History: Too Many Women Writers–Like Constance Fenimore Woolson–Are Left To Languish in Moldy Archives," Salon, Mar. 20, 2016.
"Eight Classic Female Bildungsromane You Should Know About, If You Don't Already," The Toast, Feb. 18, 2016.
"Tourism, Imperialism, and Hybridity in the Reconstruction South: Woolson's Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches." Southern Literary Journal 43.2 (2011): 12-32 (in Project Muse). Reprint in Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
"Domestic and Sentimental Fiction," in American History Through Literature,1870-1920. Eds. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006. 338-343.
Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Reviewed in American Literature, New England Quarterly, Legacy, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Journal of American Studies, Journal of American History, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, and American Literary Realism.
"Anticipating James, Anticipating Grief: Constance Fenimore Woolson's 'Miss Grief.'" Constance Fenimore Woolson's Nineteenth Century: Essays. Ed. Victoria Brehm. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. 191-206.
"'What! Has she got into the "Atlantic"?': Women Writers, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Formation of the American Canon." American Studies 39. 3 (Fall 1998): 5-36.
Book Selections
Great Reads from and about the 19th Century
Constance Fenimore Woolson, Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1879)
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (1862)
Elizabeth Stoddard, Two Men (1865)
Eve LaPlante, Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother (2012)
Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (2012)
Colm Toibin, The Master (2005)--novel about Henry James and Woolson
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)--Not just for girls, and not just for kids!
Fun Reads
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches
Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
Research Interests
Dr. Rioux is currently completing The Story of Little Women, a "biography" of the classic novel, which was published by W. W. Norton in 2018 for the 150th anniversary of the novel's original publication in 1868. You can learn more about her research at anneboydrioux.com, which also includes links to her many essays and reviews written for a general audience.