Northern Illinois University
Department of English
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Educational Background

• Ph.D. Indiana University, Bloomington, 2009
• M.A. Indiana University, Bloomington, 2003

Professional Interests

Melissa Adams-Campbell is Mary Suzanne Schriber Endowed Professor of Literary Studies and Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. She specializes in women and gender studies approaches to literature, especially early American and Native American literature, and the history of the book. As co-founder of NIU BookLab, she integrates hands-on humanities instruction and creative projects into courses such as “Women and Gender in Books” and her David W. Raymond award-winning “Monsters and Makers” course on Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein and the responsible use of writing technologies from handwriting to the age of AI.

Her current book project, Sovereign Domestics: Native American Women’s Leadership before 1900, explores Indigenous women’s domestic, political, and cultural authority in the context of settler colonialism. The project draws on archival research and interdisciplinary methods to reconsider Native women’s domesticity as a form of cultural sovereignty and Native nation-building. Chapters include studies of Molly Brant, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and Mourning Dove among others. Other recent publications include work on archival methods and teaching colonial and early US Latinx literatures.

Recent Grants

• Mary Suzanne Schriber Endowed Professorship for Literary Studies, 2026

• Huskie Trek Talk Grant, “From Gutenberg to Generative AI,” Spring 2026.

• David W. Raymond Award for Teaching with Technology, 2026

• NIU Opportunity Grant, “Mobile Book Lab,” Spring 2024

• Hainds Award for Undergraduate Teaching 2019-2023

Selected Publications

• “Black Hawk and Settler Possession in the Archives” in Students in the Archives, edited by Amanda Stuckey and Heather Fox, (University of Illinois Press), 2026.
• “Locating Sacagawea.” Studies in American Indian Literature. Vol 35, no 1-2, Spring-Summer 2023, pp 68-83. 
• “At Home on the Prairie?:  Black Hawk, Margaret Fuller, and American Indian Dispossession.”  Migration and Modernities: The State of Being Stateless, 1650-1850, edited by Juliet Shields and JoEllen DeLucia, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp 101-121. 
• “Writing Pocahontas: a Transatlantic Approach to Romantic Women Writers and the Rescuing Indian Maiden.”  Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity, 1780-1850: Subjects, Texts, and Print Culture, edited by Kathryn Gray and Annika Bautz, Routledge, 2017, pp 69-90. 
• Second author, co-authored with Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa Api. “Sanitizing ‘Indians’ in America’s Thanksgiving  Story.” QSE: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 29, no. 5, 2016, pp 655-669. 
• New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage, in “Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies,” series editor, Donald Pease, Dartmouth College Press, 2015. http://www.upne.com/1611688313.html
• Co-editor, special feature on "Indigeneity and the work of settler archives" in Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2015).  http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rset20/5/2
• Lead author, co-authored with Ashley Glassburn Falzetti and Courtney Rivard, “Introduction: Indigeneity and the work of settler archives.” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2015): 109-116. 
• “Life of Black Hawk: a Sauk and Mesquakie archive.” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2015): 145-157.
• “Romantic Revolutions: Love and Violence in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo.” Studies in American Fiction 39, no. 2 (2012): 125-46.
• “Sympathetic Transports: Reading as Imaginative and Emotional Travel.” Les Carnets du Cerpac n°5, ed. by Michèle Lurdos and Judith Misrahi-Barak, Service des Publications: Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III, 2007.

 

Editing and Co-authored Work

• “Introduction” to special forum on “Teaching Colonial and Early US Latinx Literature” in Resources in American Literary Study, vol 45, no 2 (2025).
• With Matthew Short. “Reading Race in Dime Novels; or Pedagogies of Popular Nineteenth-Century American Literature.” Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, Fall 2018, pp 23-41. https://www.cpcc.edu/sites/default/files/2019-04/taltp_fa_18_short_23_41.pdf
• “Introduction.” Trials of the Human Heart [1795], by Susanna Rowson, edited by Richard Pressman, Early American Reprints, 2017, pp 4-19.
• With Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa Api. “Sanitizing ‘Indians’ in America’s Thanksgiving Story.” QSE: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 29, no. 5, 2016, pp 655-669.
• With Ashley Glassburn Falzetti and Courtney Rivard, “Introduction: Indigeneity and the work of settler archives.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015, pp 109-116.