Audrey Goodman

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1997

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American
Literature and Southwestern Studies

Audrey Goodman’s research and teaching interests focus on the literary and visual cultures of the greater U.S. Southwest and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her first book, Translating Southwestern Landscapes, won the 2003 Thomas J. Lyon Award for the Best Critical Book on Western American Literature from the Western Literature Association for its examination of the literary formation of the American Southwest. Her second book, Lost Homelands: Ruin and Reconstruction in the Twentieth-Century Southwest (U of Arizona Press, 2010), offers new perspectives on the history and value of vernacular landscapes such as the road, the bridge, and the border as sites for negotiating everyday life and articulating cultural continuity under conditions of colonization.

Currently she is completing A Planetary Lens: The Photo-poetics of Western Women’s Writing, a book that considers how stories of personal, social, and environmental transformation emerge through the interplay of images and text in a wide range of visual narratives. Forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in fall 2021, this book argues that at a time when digital archives make the reproduction of images effortless, critical attention to the materiality of the photographic image and to the cultural significance of the book as circulating object offers a means of reassessing the power of print to generate intimate and planetary senses of time and place. Additional current projects include contributions to Routledge’s Handbook to North American Indigenous Modernities and Modernisms, edited by Kirby Brown, Alana Sayers, and Stephen Ross, and The Routledge Companion to Gender and the West, edited by Susan Bernardin, as well as a series of essays that aim to archive contemporary feminist geographies.

Dr. Goodman has held research fellowships at the Huntington Library in Pasadena and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe. Invited to teach as a visiting professor at the University of Venice-Cà Foscari, the University of Toulouse, and the University of Bergamo, she currently directs student exchange programs with three universities in France, the University of Toulouse, the Jean-François Champollion University, and University of Versailles/Paris Saclay. As co-president of the Western Literature Association with Lisa Tatonetti (Kansas State University), she will be hosting the organization’s annual conference in Santa Fe in 2022.