Myrto Drizou
I am an Associate Professor of English and American Literature in the Faculty of Education and Arts. I joined Nord University in August 2023 after teaching at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul (2018-23), Valdosta State University (2013-18), and the University of Illinois at Springfield (2012-13) in the US. I hold a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, an MA in Politics and International Relations from the University of Warwick, and a BA in English and Greek Language and Literature from the University of Athens. I am originally from Greece but I consider myself a citizen of the world and I am very happy to make Norway my home.
My teaching and research focus on American Studies, women's literature, gender studies, and the intersections of literature, identity, and culture in English Education. At Nord University, I teach courses for the One-Year Programs in English (3EN and 20ENG), the Bachelor of English Program (BAENG), the Master's Degree in Primary and Lower-Secondary Teacher Education (MAGLU), and the Senior Teacher (Lektor) Education in Social Sciences Master's Degree (LESAMF).
I am s specialist on the work of American author Edith Wharton and have been elected to serve as President of the International Edith Wharton Society (2023-25) after serving as Vice-President (2021-23) and Secretary (2019-21). I am currently serving as Immediate Past President for the Society as well as Associate Editor of the peer reviewed journal, the Edith Wharton Review published by Pennsylvania State UP.
At Nord University, I teach and coordinate the following courses:
ENG2024: Women's Literature-Mobility, Identity, and Change
ENG1018: Language, Text, and Culture in the English-Speaking World
ENG2C/ENG2027: American Literature and Culture for Teacher Education
ENG5001: Critical Reflections on Literature and Language in English Teaching Practices (Fall 2024)
I also teach on several other courses, including:
ME120L: Research and Writing
SP203L: Business English
SP157/172L: American Studies
ENG2002: American Literature and Culture for Teacher Education (Grades 5-10)
ENG2023: Literature and Film
VIT 5001-2: Research Theory and Methods
Prior to joining Nord University, I taught for several years in the US and Turkey. I have taught a wide range of courses, such as survey courses of American and British Literature, Introduction to American Studies, World Literature, Academic Writing, and upper-level as well as MA seminars on realism and naturalism, regionalism, representations of the American self, the Gilded and the Jazz Age, and Edith Wharton.
I have extensive experience as a supervisor and I am available to supervise BA, MA, and PhD theses on American literature and culture; multicultural approaches to literature; teaching literature in the English language classroom; cultural studies; turn-of-the-century fiction; realism; naturalism; women and gender; and Edith Wharton.
I specialize in 19th- and 20th-century American literature with particular focus on late 19th/early 20th-century genres (realism, naturalism, regionalism) and women's fiction. I am currently working on a book project that examines the connections between archaeology and literature in 19th- and early 20th-century American culture. At Nord University, I am a member of the Humanities, Education and Culture Research Group.
Publications:
Edited Collections
New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain. Edinburgh UP, 2023.
Critical Insights: Edith Wharton. Salem Press, 2017.
Journal Issues
American Literary Naturalism and the World, special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 20, no. 3, 2020, pp. 1-205.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“American Literature and the Quest for Origin.” Rodolphe Gasché and the Idea of Europe, special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review. Forthcoming (2025).
“Ulysses’ Gaze: Mediterranean Seascapes and Edith Wharton’s Creative Imagination.” Edith Wharton and the Mediterranean, edited by Maureen E. Montgomery and Sara Prieto, University of Salamanca P. Forthcoming (2025).
“The Dream House of American Culture: Archives of the Self, Visions of the Future.” Teaching American Studies in the Nordic Countries, special issue of American Studies in Scandinavia, edited by Jenny Bonnevier and Adam Hjorthén, vol. 56, no. 2, 2024, pp. 131-36.
“Telling the Story of the ‘Stranger People’: Archaeological Imaginaries and Indigenous Encounters in Mary Noailles Murfree’s Regionalist Fiction.” America the Beautiful? Regionalism and Indigeneity, special issue of American Literary Realism, edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden, vol. 56, no. 3, 2024, pp. 212-26.
“Transatlantic Lloronas: Infanticide and Gender in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Alexandros Papadiamantis.” New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain, edited by Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou, and Cécile Roudeau, Edinburgh UP, 2023, pp. 95-111.
“Reading Freeman Again, Anew.” Co-authored with Stephanie Palmer and Cécile Roudeau. New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain, edited by Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou, and Cécile Roudeau, Edinburgh UP, 2023, pp. 1-21.
“Seeking a Home for the Wretched Exotics: Edith Wharton’s Heterotopic Views of Greece.” The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, edited by Emily J. Orlando, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, pp. 193-207.
“Edith Wharton’s Odyssey.” The New Edith Wharton Studies, edited by Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 65-79.
“Wavering in Delight: Time, Progress, and the Turn of the Century in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.” American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity, edited by Meredith Goldsmith and Melanie Dawson, UP of Florida, 2018, pp. 56-76.
“The Politics of Time in Frank Norris’s Criticism and Fiction.” Excavatio: International Review for Multidisciplinary Approaches and Comparative Studies Related to Émile Zola and Naturalism, vol. XXVIII, 2016.
“The Undecidable Miss Bart: Edith Wharton’s Naturalism in The House of Mirth.” 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies, vol. 38, 2016, pp. 21-49.
“‘Go Steady, Undine!’ The Horror of Ambition in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.” Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties, edited by Sharon Yang and Kathy Healey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 125-45.
“Citizenship in the ‘Land of Letters’: Edith Wharton’s Literary Home in Exile.” Critical Insights: American Writers in Exile, edited by Jeff Birkenstein and Robert Hauhart, Salem Press, 2015, pp. 73-87.
“Floundering between Worlds Passed and Worlds Coming: The Charm of the Unstable Balance in Henry Adams.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 2012, pp. 65-86.
Reviews and Other Publications
“The United States’ Legacy and its Declining Credibility.” Democracy on the Front Lines: Polarization, Culture and Resilience in America and the World. Salzburg Global Seminar, 2023. https://www.salzburgglobal.org/news/latest-news/article/the-united-states-legacy-and-its-declining-credibility
Review of Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction, edited by Ferdâ Asya. Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 57, no. 1, 2023, pp. 94-98.
Review of Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction, by Laura Rattray. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 50, no. 4, 2021, pp. 419-21.
“Edith Wharton: Realist or Naturalist?” Colonial Era to the 19th Century in American Literature, edited by Laura Leibman. Gale, 2016.
Review of Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity, by Katherine Fusco. Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 11, no. 1, 2016, pp. 99-102.
Review of American Writers in Europe: 1850 to the Present, edited by Ferdâ Asya. Edith Wharton Review, vol. 32, no. 1-2, 2016, pp. 93-97.
“Introduction.” The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural. By Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. 1903. Hastings College Press, 2015, pp. vii-xxi.
Review of From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, by Hildegard Hoeller. 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies, vol. 33, 2013, pp. 94-98.
Book Manuscripts in Preparation
Archaeological Imaginations and the Construction of the American Self
ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS
2025 “Artistic Aspirations in Edith Wharton’s Late Fiction.” Nordic Association for American Studies Conference, Turku, Finland (4-6 June)
2024 “Teaching Identity and Trauma in Contemporary Women’s Literature.” Year-End Seminar, Humanities, Education, and Culture Research Group, Nord University, Bodø, Norway (6 December)
2024 “‘The Dream House Was Never Just the Dream House’: Queering the Gothic in Carmen Maria Machado’s Non-Fiction.” American Literature Association Conference, Chicago, IL, USA (23-26 May)
2023 “Teaching the US to Non-US Audiences: The American Literature and Culture Survey.” American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, USA (25-28 May)
2022 “Telling the Story of the ‘Leetle People’: Mary Noailles Murfree’s Archaeological Imagination.” Swiss Association for North American Studies, Fribourg, Switzerland (18-19 November)
2021 “‘You stood beside me, and I was [not] afraid’: The Moment of Daring Men in Edith Wharton’s Poetry.” Modern Language Association Convention, Virtual Conference (7-10 January)
2021 “Transatlantic Lloronas: Alternative Economies of Gender in Modern Greek and American Fiction.” Modern Language Association Convention, Virtual Conference (7-10 January)
2020 “Alternative Homecomings: Edith Wharton’s Revision of The Odyssey in The Children.” Edith Wharton Society Conference, New York, NY, USA (17-20 June)- canceled due to COVID-19 pandemic
2019 “Konstantinos Theotokis’s Honor and Money: A New Intertext for Edith Wharton’s Glimpses of the Moon.” American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, USA (23-26 May)
2019 “Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Edith Wharton and Greece.” Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, IL, USA (3-6 January)
2018 “The Unruly Tongue of American Naturalism in Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds.” American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco, CA, USA (24-27 May)
2017 “Expanding the Limits of Greek Naturalism: The Curious Case of Alexandros Papadiamantis.” Conference of the International Association for Studies of Émile Zola and Naturalism, Debrecen, Hungary (8-10 June)
2017 “Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in New Transatlantic Contexts.” American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, USA (25-28 May)
2017 “Writing the Modern in Greek and American Literary Naturalism.” Modern Language Association Convention, Philadelphia, PA, USA (5-8 January)
2016 “The Monstrous ‘Underworld of Affairs’: Visions of Gothic Excess in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.” Edith Wharton Society Conference, Washington D.C., USA (2-4 June)
2016 “Phantasms of Excess: The Transatlantic Gothic of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.” European Association for American Studies Conference, Constanta, Romania (22-25 April)
2016 “Flirting with Naturalism: The Undecidable Temporality of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Modern Language Association Convention, Austin, TX, USA (7-10 January)
2015 “Ghostly Presence, Haunting Absence: Liminal Spaces in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's New England Gothic.” Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference, Philadelphia, PA, USA (4-8 November)
2014 “From Excess to Scarcity: Food, Consumption, and the Pendulum of Modernity in American Literary Naturalism.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, Atlanta, GA, USA (7-9 November)
2014 “‘To Instruct and to Delight’: Realism, Naturalism, and the Goal of Human Citizenship.” American Literature Association Conference, Washington D.C., USA (22-25 May)
2014 “The Author on the Market: Naturalist Aesthetics and Turn-of-the-Century Consumerism.” Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Harrisburg, PA, USA (3-6 April)
2014 “A Tenuous Negotiation: The Politics of Genre in Frank Norris’s Theory of Fiction.” Conference of the International Association for Studies of Émile Zola and Naturalism, New Orleans, LA, USA (6-8 March)
2013 “Food and History in the World Literature Classroom: Tassos Boulmetis’s A Touch of Spice.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, Atlanta, GA, USA (8-10 November)
2013 “Reckoning with the Future: Time and Agency in American Literary Naturalism.” Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts Conference, Greensboro, NC, USA (18-19 October)
2013 “Calling for Justice: American Literary Naturalism and the Question of Genre.” American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, USA (23-26 May)
2013 “Between ‘Accuracy’ and ‘Truth’: Frank Norris’s Definition of Naturalism and the Nature of Authorship.” College English Association Conference, Savannah, GA, USA (4-6 April)
2012 “The Promise of Change: Scientific Contexts in The Education of Henry Adams.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, Durham, NC, USA (9-11 November)
2012 “The Use of Attempting the Impossible: Edith Wharton’s Backward Glance in The Age of Innocence.” Edith Wharton Society Conference, Florence, Italy (6-8 June)
2011 “Lily Bart’s Necessary Failure: Edith Wharton’s Vision of the Future in The House of Mirth.” American Literature Association Conference, Savannah, GA, USA (22-24 September)
2010 “Negotiating the Relation between the Past and the Future: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, New Orleans, LA, USA (1-4 April)
INVITED LECTURES
2024 “Reading Literature in the Twenty-First Century.” Lecture for First-Year High School Students, Bodø High School (Videregaende), Norway
2024 “Coming of Age in American Naturalism: Edith Wharton’s Summer and Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank.” American Literary Naturalism Symposium, University of Gävle, Sweden (17-18 October)
2024 “The Power of Words: Community and Hope in Amanda Gorman’s Poetry.” English Seminar for Senior High School Students, Nord University, Norway
2022 “Healing the Wounds, Finding a Home: Edith Wharton and the First World War.” A Day with Humanities: Post-War Condition Conference, Galatasaray Lisesi, Istanbul, Turkey
2019 “‘Toiling Voyages Upon the Sea’: Wanderings and Homecomings in Edith Wharton’s Life and Work.” PhD Colloquium Lecture Series, Graduate School of Social Sciences, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey