Edith Frampton, PhD

Dr. Edith Frampton researches and writes about twentieth-century and contemporary literature written in English from around the globe, with a particular focus on women writers and issues related to gender, the body, and identity.  She is the invited Guest Editor of Contemporary Women’s Writing: New Texts, Approaches, and Technologies, a November 2011 Special Issue of the Oxford University Press peer-reviewed journal Contemporary Women’s Writing.  Her essay “From the Nobel to Oprah: Toni Morrison, Body Politics, and Winfrey’s Book Club,” appears in a 2010 University of Mississippi Press collection, Stories of O: The Oprahfication of American Culture.  Also recently published, in a 2009 Continuum volume, Doris Lessing: Border Crossings, is her essay “Horrors of the Breast: Cultural Boundaries and the Abject in The Grass in Singing.”  The monograph Michèle Roberts is forthcoming as part of the Northcote House and British Council series Writers and Their Work, and an essay on this prominent British contemporary writer also appears in the winter 2006 issue of Textual Practice.  Dr. Frampton has previously published essays on Toni Morrison, in the Routledge journal Women: A Cultural Review, and on Melanie Klein and object relations psychoanalytic theory, in the Taylor and Francis journal Australian Feminist Studies.  Her essay on the figure of the wet nurse – through history and as represented in recent writing – is included in a 2007 Cambridge Scholars collection, Back to the Future of the Body.  Dr. Frampton is a Book Reviews Editor for Contemporary Women’s Writing and is an active member of the international Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, for which she co-organized the Third Biennial International Conference in July 2010 with Dr. Anne Donadey.  She earned her Ph.D. in literature from the University of London, after first launching her graduate studies at Yale University and graduating from the Drama Division of Juilliard.  As a Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at S.D.S.U., Dr. Frampton has taught a range of British and other Anglophone literary topics, from The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano to Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry.  With an extensive background in theatre, Dr. Frampton has also led courses focused on British and American drama.  She is a proud recipient of a 2005 Outstanding Faculty Award and a 2009 Residential Students’ Favorite Faculty Member Award.  She can be contacted at eframpto@mail.sdsu.edu.