Education:
B.A. and M.A. at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia
Ph.D. at The University of Tulsa
Contact:
Office: Cate 2
Email: melissa-antonucci@ou.edu
During her time at TU, Melissa worked as a graduate assistant in the English Department and in the department of Special Collections in McFarlin Library; she was also a member of the editorial staff of the journal Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Melissa has served as co-chair of the Graduate Student Caucus for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and is co-founder of the Junior Scholars’ Caucus for the Society of Early Americanists (SEA). In additions, she recently completed a one-year postdoctoral appointment teaching Freshman Composition and American literature courses at TU.
In 2014, Melissa received the Bellwether Fellowship to complete her dissertation, “Reluctant Adventurers: The Risky Business of Female Travel in Stories by Anglophone Women, 1767-1830.” Her research concerns women’s transnational mobility within the early Atlantic world and offers a new context for thinking about the ways in which texts centered on female mobility participate in reorienting women as adventurers in their own right. Currently, she is at work on an essay for a collected volume on trauma in early American literature wherein she explores the interconnectedness between trauma that results from exile, embedded social and cultural values of geographical environments, and the reconstitution of home as they merge within imagined early British Atlantic landscapes.
