Stodola, Zabelle
Zabelle Stodola, PhD
Director, William G. Cooper, Jr., Honors Program
Rank: Professor
Office: 501-D Stabler Hall
Office Phone: 569.8315
Home Phone: 664.8747
E-mail: kzstodola@ualr.edu
Educational Background
PhD, Pennsylvania State University
Areas of Focus
Early American Literature, Women Writers, and Captivity Narratives
Publishing Vita
- Her most recent book is Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, which came out from Penguin in 1998. She has also published The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900, co-authored with James A. Levernier (1993), and edited Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole (1992) and The Journal and Occasional Writings of Sarah Wister (1987). Her book manuscript The War in Words: Reading the Dakota Conflict through the Captivity Literature is contracted with a major university press. This critical monograph examines the radically & “racially” different cultural, literary, class, gendered, and historical discourses in twenty-four of the dozens of captivity narratives by Dakotas and European Americans concerning the 1862 U.S.-Dakota Conflict in Minnesota.
- Her recent articles include the following:
- “Teaching Dead Man Walking as a Multi-Genre Text,” accepted for a collection of essays on Helen Prejean edited by John Allen for Sacred Heart University Press. Forthcoming 2007.
- “’Many persons say I am a “Mono Maniac”’: Three Letters from Dakota Conflict Captive Sarah F. Wakefield to Missionary Stephen R. Riggs, Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 29 (2004): 1-24.
- “Dime Novels.” Co-authored with Colin T. Ramsey. In A Companion to American Fiction 1780-1865, edited by Shirley Samuels. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 262-73.
- “The Captive as Celebrity.” In Lives out of Letters: Essays in American Literary Biography and Documentation, edited by Robert D. Habich. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. 65-92.
From 2003 to 2005, she was President of the Society of Early Americanists. She has received two Summer Stipend Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (in 1997 and 2003) as well as many other grants for her work. She has also served on the editorial boards of Early American Literature and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and is currently on the editorial board of Literature in the New Republic.
Locally, she is known as the voice of “Speaking Volumes,” spots on literary topics that she conceptualized and developed on KLRE and KUAR, the two National Public Radio stations based in Little Rock and airing throughout the state.