Info
Professor of History, Literature, and the Arts
Faculty Suite J, Room 116
Janet Dean
Janet Dean writes and teaches about American literature, Native American literature, and literature of social and political protest. She is the author of Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy (2016), as well as essays, chapters, and reviews in a number of journals and collections.
Degrees Awarded
Ph D, Columbia University
M Phil, Columbia University
MA, Columbia University
BA, Colby College
Selected Publications
Dean, J., Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers Protesting United States Indian Policy, University of Massachusetts Press, 2016.
Dean, J., "Getting on with Things: Ojibwe Ontology and Relationality in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum", Studies in American Indian Literature, 2020.
Dean, J., “‘Exil’d murmurings’: ‘The American Hemans’ and the Politics of Displacement", University of Massachusetts Press, 2018.
Dean, J., Review of Valerie Sherer Mathes and Phil Brigandi, A Call for Reform: The Southern California Indian Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson , ALH On-Line Review/American Literary History, 2017.
Dean, J., "Reading Lessons: Sentimental Literacy and Assimilation in Stiya: A Carlisle Indian Girl at Home and Wynema: A Child of the Forest.”, Layman Poupard Publishing, 2015.
Dean, J., Review essay on Christopher Hager, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing; Barbara Hochman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution; Michael Millner, Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere; Gillian Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America, American Literature, 2014.
Dean, J., Review of Kimberly A. Williams, Imagining Russia: Making Feminist Sense of American Nationalism in U.S.-Russian Relations, Russian Journal of Communication, 2013.
Dean, J., Review of Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, eds., Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays. , Western American Literature, 2012.
Dean, J., “Reading Lessons: Sentimental Literacy and Assimilation in Stiya: A Carlisle Indian Girl at Home and Wynema: A Child of the Forest.”, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 2011.
Dean, J., Review of Victoria I. Zhuravleva and Ivan I. Kurilla, eds., Russia and the United States: Mutual Representations in Textbooks, Russian Journal of Communication , 2011.
Coughlin, M.,Hasseler, T.,Dalessio, W.,Martinetti, A.,Rex, N.,Janice, O.,Walden, E.,Dean, J., “Roundtable on Teaching ‘Work’ as an Interdisciplinary First-Year College Seminar", Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2010.
Dean, J., “The Violence of Collection: Indian Killer’s Archives.”, Studies in American Indian Literature , 2008.
Dean, J., “Persephone Goes West", Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007.
Dean, J., "Nameless Outrages: Narrative Authority, Rape Rhetoric, and the Dakota Conflict of 1862", American Literature, 2005.
Dean, J., “Stopping Traffic: Spectacles of Romance and Race in The Last of the Mohicans", University of Mississippi Press, 2003.
Dean, J., “Gender Calamities in a Dime Western", Greenwood Press, 2002.
Dean, J., “Searching for the New Western Literary Criticism” , Modern Fiction Studies, 2000.
Dean, J., “The Marriage Plot and National Myth in The Pioneers.”, Arizona Quarterly, 1997.
Dean, J., “Women on the Masthead.” Review of Sharon M. Harris, ed., Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands. H-Net Reviews, Humanities and Social Sciences Net On-Line,, H-Net Reviews, Humanities and Social Sciences Net On-Line, 2006.
Dean, J., “Combating the Culture of Plagiarism", Bryant Faculty Network, 2002.
Dean, J., "Noble Savage", Encyclopedia Entry, 2001.
Dean, J., Review of Gretchen Cassel Eick, They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans' Story, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.
Dean, J., Review of Indigenuity: Native Craftwork and the Art of American Literature, Material Culture.
Dean, J., Review essay on Amanda J. Zink, Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850-1950; James J. Donahue, Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2015), and Kevin Brtiz, Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier West, American Literature, 2020.
Awards and Honors
Bryant University Summer Stipend Award, 2024
Bryant University Faculty Merit Award, 2023
Bryant University Distinguished Faculty Award, 2022
Bryant University Faculty Merit Award, 2018
Bryant University Summer Stipend, 2018
Bryant University Faculty Innovation Grant, 2017
Bryant University Faculty Merit Award, 2014
Bryant University Faculty Merit Award, 2012
Bryant University Summer Stipend, 2012
Tomaquag Board Member of the Year, 2010
Bryant University Learn & Serve Grant, 2009
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, 2008
Bryant University Faculty Merit Award, 2007
Don D. Walker Essay Prize in Western American Literature, 2006
Bryant University Faculty Merit Award, 2005
Bryant Women's Herstory Month Faculty Award, 2004
Bryant University Faculty Merit Award, 2003
Bryant University Summer Stipend, 2002
Kathleen Gregory Klein Award Nominee, 1999
University of South Dakota Research Enhancement Award, 1999
Bancroft Dissertation Award Nominee, 1996
Teaching Interests
U.S. Protest Literature and Culture, Native American Studies, American Studies, American Literary Contexts, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Research Interests
The Frontier in American Culture, 18th- and 19th-Century American Literature, Gender Studies, Native American Studies, American Studies, Material Culture Studies
Professional Memberships
American Studies Association
Modern Literature Association
New England American Studies Association
Women's Studies Association
Association for the Study of American Indian Literature
Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Research Society for American Periodicals
Humanities Education Research Association
Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists