Tova Cooper

Tova Cooper
Assistant Professor

Contact

Office: CPR 384
Phone: 813/974-9542
Email:

Bio

Tova Cooper is currently working on a manuscript titled Educational Curricula, Americanization, and the Autobiography of a New Citizenry, 1880-1930. Dr. Cooper’s work explores the role of the child in the forging of a U.S. national identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on educational history, children’s literature, and theories of national belonging, Cooper’s work examines both the discourses of citizenship directed at a variety of ethnic groups in the U.S. (including African Americans, American Indians, and East European Jews), and analyzes imaginative challenges to those discourses in memoirs and autobiographies written by new U.S. citizens during this period.

Dr. Cooper has an essay on the Sioux writer Charles Eastman forthcoming in Arizona Quarterly and titled “On Autobiography, Boy Scouts, and Citizenship: Revisiting Charles Eastman’s Deep Woods.” Dr. Cooper has also published on postmodern science fiction comics, in her essay “Who’s Been Duped?: Communists, Kids and Dangerous Drawings in Entertaining Comics’ ‘Cosmic Ray Bomb Explosion,’” as well as on Zora Neale Hurston, in an essay (co-authored with Brian Carr) titled “Zora Neale Hurston and Modernism at the Critical Limit.”

In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Cooper has been involved in doing outreach in the public schools. She has contributed to curriculum reform as the Managing Editor for Humanities Out There, a non-profit organization that creates innovative, primary-source-based curricula for the Santa Ana Public Schools, and is currently involved with Hillsborough and Pasco counties, who have joined with USF professors to improve training for K-12 teachers. In her free time, Dr. Cooper makes ceramic art, co-authors a blog on children’s literature (sleepskipping.blogspot.com), and spends time with her son, Leo, and her husband, Stan Apps.

Current Courses