Kristina Bross

Ph.D., English, University of Chicago, 1997

Specialization

American Literature

Research Areas:
Exploration and mission writings in American Literature, transatlantic studies, gender and early colonial American culture

Kristina Bross completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1997 and held an appointment at California Polytechnic State University until 1999, when she joined the Purdue faculty. She has chapters in several collections of essays, and has published in the print journal Early American Literature and Common-place, an on-line journal of early American culture. Undergraduate courses include courses on early American literature, archival research, historical fiction and science fiction.  Graduate offerings include courses on colonial identities, early Native American writers, captivity narratives, early Caribbean literature in English, and violence in American literature.  Her books include Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Cornell 2004), examines the so-called "Praying Indian" figure in transatlantic mission literature and the construction of English national and colonial identities in the 17th-century and Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (U Mass, 2008, co-edited with Hilary Wyss).  Her current work is a book-length project on the relationship of New England to Cromwell's Western Design.