Faculty Profile for Dr. Geneva Marie Gano

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Dr. Geneva M. Gano grew up on a farm in Central Washington State. She attended Stanford University (B.A. English, 1995), served in AmeriCorps, and has worked in both public and private schools teaching in the humanities and in ESL. She attended graduate school at UCLA (Ph.D. English, 2007), where she received a Ph.D. minor in Women's Studies. In 2007-2008, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. She has also taught at Indiana University and Antioch College in American Studies, Latino Studies, and Literature.

Teaching Interests

In addition to teaching a range of courses on American literature and culture, Dr. Gano regularly teaches an archivally-based course focused on the Sandra Cisneros Papers at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

Research Interests

Geneva Gano's first book, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos, was published in August, 2020 by Edinburgh University Press as a part of their series on Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century. This comparative study investigates the relationship between modernist aesthetics, social networks, and emergent tourism and real estate industries. Through a consideration of the literary writings and art works of major modernist figures including Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O'Neill, D. H. Lawrence, Marsden Hartley, and Susan Glaspell, this book resituates modernist activity as emphatically localized work that responds particularly to the pressures of the modern world-system from its far-flung peripheries to its metropolitan centers.

Dr. Gano's second book project, Portraits of Revolution: American Literary Modernism and the Mexican Vogue, 1910-1940 (in progress), extends the concerns of her first book into a transnational context by considering the relationship between the art forms of the Mexican Revolution and the development of U.S. modernism. Arguing that the impact of the Mexican Revolution on the development of modernist literature in the United States was primary and definitive, Gano works from Perry Anderson’s claim that “the imaginative proximity of social revolution” was a determining factor for the emergence of European modernism. This study finds an important impetus for U.S. modernism within an American, hemispheric context: the earlier, longer, and much more immediately proximate Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).

Dr. Gano is also co-editor, with Dr. Sonia Saldívar-Hull (UTSA), of the first major collection of scholarly essays on the internationally celebrated writer, Sandra Cisneros: ‘Ay Tú!’: Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros. This volume, which is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press in 2024, takes a comprehensive look at Cisneros' work and career.

Dr. Gano's research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, the Huntington Library, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, UCLA's Young Research Library, The Center for the Study of the American West at Texas State University, and Texas State University's Research Enhancement Program.