Elizabeth Kelley Bowman | University of Guam (original) (raw)
Elizabeth Kelley Bowman, Ph.D. (English – Northern Illinois University), is assistant professor of comparative literature at I Unibetsedåt Guåhan (the University of Guam), where she is also the program coordinator for Women and Gender Studies.
Primary fields of study include comparative literature, British literature, Shakespeare, social ethnography, and women and gender studies.
Recent and current projects include guest-editing a special issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (2015) on contemporary Jacobean adaptation, editing Pacific Asia Inquiry with a special issue (2015) on women, children, gender, and the family, and essays on Chamorro women pressed into sexual slavery during WW2; Caresse Crosby, Canada Lee, and whiteface; and the Carmina Burana.
She is a project leader for the Fino’ Chamoru oral narratives website Hongga Mo’na: For the Future <honggamona.com> a continuing project funded in 2015 by a generous grant from the Guam Council on the Arts and Humanities Agency.
Phone: 671-735-2885
Address: c/o Division of English and Applied Linguistics
UOG Station
Mangilao, GU 96923
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Papers by Elizabeth Kelley Bowman
This article examines Mary Wortley Montagu’s self-representation in her letters in the context of... more This article examines Mary Wortley Montagu’s self-representation in her letters in the context of literature, history, and culture, especially her literal and metaphorical translations of a Turkish love lyric in a letter to Alexander Pope in the spring of 1717. Beginning with a survey of recent feminist and postcolonial criticism in Montagu studies, including the fraught term of “orientalism” as it has sometimes been applied recursively to understand the discourse of Montagu’s era, I emphasize Montagu’s own words as she presents herself and her purpose in the letter and as she makes use of tropes of foreignness, literary tradition, and artistic merit. Along with a consideration of critical interpretations of Montagu, this article provides a historical and cultural analysis of Montagu’s understanding of a poet’s role and explores the political resonance of her choice to translate a Turkish lyric for Pope, an icon of British poetry.
"In 1671 the Chamorro maga’låhi (male leader) Hurao of Hagåtña on the western Pacific isle of Guå... more "In 1671 the Chamorro maga’låhi (male leader) Hurao of Hagåtña on the western Pacific isle of Guåhan (Americanized to “Guam”) delivered a speech to several hundred warriors, rallying them to defend their homeland against Spanish colonizers. Hurao was the first Chamorro to formally organize resistance to their colonizers. Part of his ire stemmed from the claim that “ma na’huyong kumu kado’kado’ yan dinagi i fina’pos-ta,” or “They treat our history as fable and fiction” (Chamoru Language Commission). The derogatory terms kado’kado’ and dinagi would have been used by the Spanish to suggest falsely that the Chamorro tales of marvels and wonders were empty of meaning, societal delusions, lies stripped of wonder and without power. However, traditional wonder histories, such as those evoked by Hurao, do encode social values and systems, which endure in the tales and in culture more broadly and continue to animate present-day Indigenous resistance and sociopolitical activism." (first paragraph)
Co-authored with Michael Lujan Bevacqua (University of Guam)
This article examines Mary Wortley Montagu’s self-representation in her letters in the context of... more This article examines Mary Wortley Montagu’s self-representation in her letters in the context of literature, history, and culture, especially her literal and metaphorical translations of a Turkish love lyric in a letter to Alexander Pope in the spring of 1717. Beginning with a survey of recent feminist and postcolonial criticism in Montagu studies, including the fraught term of “orientalism” as it has sometimes been applied recursively to understand the discourse of Montagu’s era, I emphasize Montagu’s own words as she presents herself and her purpose in the letter and as she makes use of tropes of foreignness, literary tradition, and artistic merit. Along with a consideration of critical interpretations of Montagu, this article provides a historical and cultural analysis of Montagu’s understanding of a poet’s role and explores the political resonance of her choice to translate a Turkish lyric for Pope, an icon of British poetry.
"In 1671 the Chamorro maga’låhi (male leader) Hurao of Hagåtña on the western Pacific isle of Guå... more "In 1671 the Chamorro maga’låhi (male leader) Hurao of Hagåtña on the western Pacific isle of Guåhan (Americanized to “Guam”) delivered a speech to several hundred warriors, rallying them to defend their homeland against Spanish colonizers. Hurao was the first Chamorro to formally organize resistance to their colonizers. Part of his ire stemmed from the claim that “ma na’huyong kumu kado’kado’ yan dinagi i fina’pos-ta,” or “They treat our history as fable and fiction” (Chamoru Language Commission). The derogatory terms kado’kado’ and dinagi would have been used by the Spanish to suggest falsely that the Chamorro tales of marvels and wonders were empty of meaning, societal delusions, lies stripped of wonder and without power. However, traditional wonder histories, such as those evoked by Hurao, do encode social values and systems, which endure in the tales and in culture more broadly and continue to animate present-day Indigenous resistance and sociopolitical activism." (first paragraph)
Co-authored with Michael Lujan Bevacqua (University of Guam)