Mary I. Unger

I am an associate professor of English and Chair of the department as well as coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Ripon College, where I teach courses in American literature and gender and sexuality studies. I received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012 with a graduate minor in Gender and Women’s Studies.

My research interests include twentieth-century American literature, recovery work, women’s reception practices and reading communities, middlebrow literature, literature of the Midwest, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, and pedagogy. My recent work can be found in Reception, MELUS, and Legacy.

In 2020 I was honored to receive the David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature for my essay, “The Book Circle: Black Women Readers and Middlebrow Taste in Chicago, 1943-1953,” published in the peer-reviewed journal Reception. 

This essay is the first work to be published from my current book project, Reading the Renaissance: Black Women’s Literary Reception and Taste in Chicago, 1932-1953, which is under advance contract with UMass Press as part of its Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book series.