Brigitte Fielder

Department of Comparative Literature & Folklore Studies

Brigitte Fielder is an Associate Professor at UW-Madison. She received her Ph.D. in English with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University. Brigitte is an expert in nineteenth-century American literature, especially African American and women writers. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America, forthcoming from Duke University Press in October 2020. Professor Fielder has held research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Animal Studies Institute – Wesleyan University Animal Studies program. From 2014-2016, she was a member of the Executive Committee of C19: the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and currently serves on the society’s Advisory Board. She also sits on the editorial board of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and the advisory board of Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (RDYL).In 2017-2018 she held the  Nellie Y. McKay Fellowship, an award that honors McKay’s pathbreaking life and career as a woman of color scholar who laid foundations for the study of African American literature.

A word from Susan Zaeske, Associate Dean of the Arts & Humanities:
Professor Brigitte Fielder dedicates her scholarly endeavor to focus on nineteenth-century African-American literature and children's literature. In particular, she is interested in issues of race and interracial kinship, as the monographs she published show. She is also a firm advocate for racial and gender justice. In this respect, her teaching courses on the representation of girlhood in fiction and doll series (American Girl books and dolls, in particular) is a strong example of her insightful dedication of her scholarship to a successfully critical pedagogical approach to social issues that are so crucial today.