Rosalie Baum
Associate Professor

Contact

Office: CPR 335
Phone: 813/974-5165
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Bio

Dr. Rosalie Murphy Baum has taught at the University of South Florida for seventeen years, with earlier appointments at Oakland University in Michigan, Michigan State, Sweet Briar College in Virginia, and the University of Florida.  She has taught and published in American Literature (Early through Modern), Southern Literature, African-American Literature, and Canadian Literature.  She also teaches Traditional English Grammar.

Dr. Baum is editor of the first edition of Contemporary Poets of the English Language, a precursor of more recent studies of literature by language rather than nation and recommended in Robert A. Wilson’s Modern Book Collecting and, with Seymour Gross, of the Norton edition of The Blithedale Romance, now in its 20th printing.  She also edited The Agrarian Concept in American Literature to 1900 and is bibliographer of the Annotated Bibliography of The Sarah Orne Jewett Collection at the University of Florida.  Representative examples of her 25 or so articles and book chapters include “Early French North-American Literature,” “Early-American Literature: Reassessing the Black Contribution,” “John Williams’s Captivity Narrative: A Consideration of Normative Ethnicity,” “The Shape of Hurston’s Fiction: ‘Isis,’ ‘Sweat,’ and ‘The Gilded Six-Bits,’” “Unstable Hegemony in [Morton] Ritts and [Matt] Cohen,” “Naturalistic Tendencies in the Canadian Novel,” “Editha’s War: ‘How Glorious,’” and “Alcoholism and Family Abuse in Maggie and The Bluest Eye,” as well as essays on James Dickey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Martha Ostenso, Henry David Thoreau, and Anne Tyler.  Dr. Baum has written many book reviews and read more than 50 conference papers, nine at different divisions of MLA and regularly at ASECS, SAMLA, and the like.

She was one of the founders and secretary-treasurer as well as editor of the newsletter of the Society for Eighteenth-Century American Studies (now merged with the Society of Early Americanists) and regularly serves on editorial boards of journals.  Dr. Baum has directed many theses and dissertations at USF and served on countless university, college, and departmental committees.  She has received Fellowships and Research Grants from NEH, the Canadian Embassy, and IBM and been awarded a number of teaching awards, including the Jerome Krivanek Distinguished Teacher Award, the highest teaching award at USF.

Dr. Baum considers the focus of much of her teaching and written work to be assailing boundaries, being among the early scholars to consider Black Literature, Canadian Literature and Early French-American Literature as well as usually silenced voices (often working class) among both female and male writers.  She considers one of her most significant professional/public contributions to have been her work as a feature-writer and reporter for The Columbus Ledger, where she broke the color barrier in Georgia newspapers outside of Atlanta when she fulfilled her assignment to write the front-page, New-Year story of the first baby born in Columbus with a story about Dorothy Jean Davis, a Black.  After considerable uproar at the paper and in the city, the story actually appeared on an inside page of the paper more than two weeks later.  Follow-up investigative reporting brought electricity to the Black rural community where the baby and her parents lived.

Education

Ph.D., University of Detroit

Specialty Area

American, Canadian, and African-American literature

Current Courses