Alison Graham-Bertolini

Alison Graham-Bertolini is a professor of English literature and the Director of English Graduate Studies at North Dakota State University. Her research examines the intersections of gender, race, and class in American, ethnic, and postcolonial literatures, centering the voices and experiences of marginalized communities through the application of feminist theory. Across her work, she asks how fiction, particularly by women and writers of color, makes visible the structures of power that shape embodied life, from the racial landscapes of the American South to the diasporic aftermaths of global conflict.

Her scholarship spans several interconnected areas: southern women’s fiction and the contemporary American gothic, where she investigates how writers deploy metaphor and the uncanny to interrogate racial and gendered hierarchies; disability studies and posthumanism, exploring how literary texts challenge normative embodiment; and transnational feminist literatures, with attention to migration, motherhood, and displacement. Whether reading Carson McCullers through the lens of #MeToo-era sexual politics, tracing the legacies of war in Somali women’s fiction, or examining the Gothic feminine double in contemporary literature by women, Graham-Bertolini brings feminist theory into sustained dialogue with questions of literary form.

Current Projects

Graham-Bertolini is currently completing Submerged: Race, Gender, and Metaphor in Southern Women’s Fiction, a monograph examining how Southern women writers use submerged and aquatic imagery to encode racial and gendered experience. She is also co-editing Illness and Dis/ability in Southern Women’s Literature with Dr. Casey Kayser, and has a chapter forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New Orleans (Cambridge UP, 2026).

Books

Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers, co-edited with Casey Kayser (Mercer University Press, 2020). Finalist, Foreword INDIES Book Award in Women’s Studies.

Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Casey Kayser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Finalist, SAMLA Best New Collection Award.

Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Winner, Lewis P. Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Selected Articles and Chapters (peer-reviewed)

“Deconstructing Racial Essentialism: The Gothic Feminine Double in Joshilyn Jackson’s The Almost Sisters and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half.” In: Daphne du Maurier and Gothic Adaptation, (Anthem Press UK, forthcoming 2027).

“Disability Justice and Animal Advocacy in Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies18.1 (2024): 87–101.

“Tracing the Impacts of War in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls.” In Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022): 45–62.

“Understanding Sexual Politics and the #MeToo Movement through the Fiction of Carson McCullers.” South Atlantic Review 86.3 (2021).

“Marilyn Chin’s Revenge: Rewriting the Racial Shadow.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. 50.1 (2017): 17–38.

“No Life Less Worthy: The Posthumanist Framework of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” South Asian Review. 34.2 (2013): 11–26.

Service and Affiliations

Graham-Bertolini is a past president of the Carson McCullers Society and serves on the advisory board of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians. She is Vice-Chair of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association (Portsmouth, England), a co-founder of the Anti-Racism Coalition at NDSU, and has served as a Title IX complaint investigator and Faculty Fellow in the Faculty Affairs and Equity Office. She is the recipient of the AHSS Outstanding Research Award (2020), the Tapestry of Inclusion Diversity Award (2020), and the Innovative Instructor Award (2024).