Associate Professor
she/hers
Office Information:
3236 Angell Hall
Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/j/97012309409
hours: Tuesdays, 8:00 - 9:00 am (Zoom); Fridays, 9:30 - 10:30 am (Zoom); and by appointment.
Language Studies; Graduate Faculty; English; Twentieth Century American; Nineteenth Century American; Pedagogy; American; Rhetoric and Composition
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Maryland 1999Current Courses
ENGLISH 140-001
First-Year Seminar on English Language and Literature
ENGLISH 319-001
Literature and Social Change
Highlighted Work and Publications

Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates
Alisse Portnoy
When Alisse Portnoy recovered petitions from the early 1830s that nearly 1,500 women sent to the U.S. Congress to protest the forced removal of Native Americans in the South, she found the first instance of women's national, collective political activism in American history. In this groundbreaking study, Portnoy links antebellum Indian removal debates with crucial, simultaneous debates about African Americans--abolition of slavery and African colonization--revealing ways European American women negotiated prohibitions to make their voices heard.Situating the debates within contemporary... See More