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Lisa M. Botshon

Professor of English, University of Maine at Augusta
Chapter Member: Maine SSN
Areas of Expertise:

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About Lisa

Bosthon's research interests include women writers, issues of gender, race, and ethnicity; American popular culture; and early 20th-century to-the-land narratives. Botshon was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; she was awarded a second Fulbright to teach at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in the Spring of 2018.

In the News

Opinion: "Celebrating 140 Years of Brunswick’s Library," Lisa M. Botshon, The Press Herald, April 20, 2023.
Opinion: "Curtis Survives the 1886 Tripledemic," Lisa M. Botshon, Harpswell and Anchor, February 10, 2023.
Opinion: "UMaine System Unified Accreditation: The Big Myth," Lisa M. Botshon (with Paul Johnsaon), MEA, December 21, 2022.
Opinion: "Green Prescription: A Zero-Waste Couple Struggles To Get on the Same Page," Lisa M. Botshon, The Press Herald, November 12, 2017.

Publications

"Louise Dickinson Rich’s: Middlebrow House in the Big Woods" Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 38, no. 1 (2021): 90-111.

Focuses on how Rich’s representation of Maine woods living negotiated gender and class in ways that were simultaneously traditional and liberatory, embracing and rejecting of familial domesticity, and transcendent and accepting of white middle-class values. Allows Rich a great deal of latitude when it comes to negotiating gender, especially in areas concerning culinary prowess, clothing, and housekeeping.

"Negro Girl (Meager)”: Black Women’s in/Visibility in Contemporary Films About Slavery" (with Melinda Plastas ). Women Activists and Civil Rights Leaders in Auto/Biographical Literature and Films (2018): 171-188.

Focuses on two recent British feature films that have documented parts of the history of the African diaspora. Explores the problematics of portraying black female agency in feature films and argues for continued vigilance in the deployment of a black feminist vision.

Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (Boston : Northeastern University Press, 2003).

Examines women writers from diverse backgrounds and works from a broad range of media, including literature, magazines, book clubs, advertising, radio, and film.  Shows how middlebrow women authors bridged gaps in an audience increasingly fragmented by economic, racial, ethnic, and regional differences.