English Department
Lynn
Houston
Literature
Phone: 898-6247
Office: Taylor 117
lmhouston@csuchico.edu
Website
I am an assistant professor of American literature. Before coming to Chico, I held a visiting assistant professorship at a university in southeastern Louisiana. I received my doctoral degree from Arizona State University in 2003. The title of my dissertation was "The Mad Cow Nexus: The Stakes/Steaks of Personhood in Global, Industrial Food Production." At Chico State, I teach courses in women’s literature, modern poetry, world literature, literary theory, and American literature of all time periods.
My research interests include food studies, women's literature/film and the body, theories of the posthuman, postcolonial studies, and chick lit. I first began my work in food studies during my graduate study at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, while funded by a Fulbright grant for independent research in comparative literature.
Some of my recent work includes:
Books:
(Co-authored with Will Lombardi) Reading Joan Didion. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, contracted.
(Co-authored with Jennifer Warren) Reading Barbara Kingsolver. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, contracted.
Food Culture of the Caribbean. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Articles in Refereed Journals:
“Closing the Hallmark Card: Teaching Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ as a Modernist Expression of Isolation,” Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 1:5 (winter 2007), forthcoming May 2008.
“Patriarchal Consumption of the Female Body in Cecilie Løveid's Måkespisere,” co-authored with Ellen Rees, From Free Love to Decadence: Literature, Letters and Drama in Modern Scandinavia. Essays in Honour of Professor Janet Garton, accepted.
“Food Safety and the Abject: Mad Cow Disease and Racist Rhetoric in the Southwest.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107:2 (fall 2007), http://saq.dukejournals.org/content/vol107/issue2/.
“‘Making Do’: Caribbean Foodways and the Economics of Postcolonial Culture.” MELUS 32.2 (fall 2007).
“World Literature for the Unworldly: Teaching Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in a General Education Course,” ArteNews July 2007 <http://www.arteeast.org/artenews/persian_lit/>.
"Putting Up with ‘Putting Up’: A Cultural Analysis of Homemade Jam in the Twenty-First Century." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). 10 Feb. 2007 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/06-houston.php>.
Creative Writing & Other Publications:
Bounceback Girl, excerpt from novel-in-progress, Paradigm vol. 1, winter 2007.
“St. Margaret of the Hearth,” Chico News and Review, 15 November 2007, Poetry 99 Contest Winner, category “Other Notable Entries.” http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Content?oid=598695“Roethke’s Truth,” Paradigm 1:3, July 2007, <http://www.therainfarm.com/paradigm3/>.
“Fishing the Bridges of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana,” CSU Chico Humanities Center Newsletter, vol. 6, no. 2, January 2007.
“Of Down-spouting and Other New Drains,” Watershed, vol. 29, no.2, spring 2006.
“What Troubles the Water,” Watershed, vol. 29, no. 1, fall 2005.
Invited Lectures:
“Our Environment, Ourselves: Toxic Bodies in Literature,” February 22, 2007: Humanities Center (2006-2007 series: The Built Environment), California State University, Chico.
“Not ‘Business As Usual’: Mad Cow Disease as Cultural Crisis,” March 3, 2006: University of California, Davis (Cultural Studies Graduate Group Colloquium).
“Technologies of the Academic Self: Learning to Share, Learning to Get Along,” December 8, 2005: California State University, Chico (Keynote Speech, English Graduate Student Council Symposium).
“Toxic-Bodies, Emergent Subjectivities,” November 3, 2005: California State University, Chico (Anthropology Forum/American Studies slot).
Conference panels organized:
Eating the Other, with Susan Willis and Stacey Jameson, American Studies Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 2008, paper “The Illogic of Illness: Reflections on the Social Construction of “Montezuma’s Revenge”
Cultural Perspectives on Science and Medicine, Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2008
Teaching and Researching Food, with Wenying Xu and Keiko Goto, Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2008, paper: “Creating an Interdisciplinary Food Studies Program: Reflections on How We Teach Food.”
Global Food, Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2007, paper: “Mad Cow Disease and Racism on the Border.”
Anthropology and Literature, Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2006, paper: “Ethnographic Research in the Humanities: the Role of Text.”
Food and Ritual, Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 2005, paper: “Policy and the Loss of Traditional Foodways: Caribbean Ritual and Holiday Food.”
Conference papers:
“The East/West Conflict as a Problem of Perspective: Pamuk, Heidegger, and the Technology of the Portrait,” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, April 2008: Long Beach, CA.
“Loss Leader Food Culture: The Psychosociology of Mad Cow Disease,” Association for the Study of Food and Society, June 2008: New Orleans, Louisiana.
“The Toxic-Body as the New Cyborg,” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, March 2006: Princeton, New Jersey.
“Food Studies Dissertations: Effectively Organizing and Writing For Interdisciplinary Committees,” Association for the Study of Food and Society, May 2005: Portland, Oregon.
“Representations of the Cannibal in the New World: A Rhetorical Recipe for Genocide,” Association for the Study of Food and Society, May 2005: Portland, Oregon.
A different language is a different vision of life."