Bio:

Dr. Goen-Salter received her Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture from Stanford University. She joined the SFSU English department in 1997 as an assistant professor in the area of Composition Studies and served for several years as director of SFSU's undergraduate wriitng program. Professor Goen-Salter's research interests include developmental education and basic writing, literacy studies (specifically the integration of reading and writing), the learning needs of non-mainstream students and writing assessment and placement. She teaches graduate courses in  theory and pedagogy and research methods in Composition Studies. Professor Goen-Salter has published articles on topics related to Generation 1.5 learners and on reading/writing integration, and she currently sits on the Executive Board of the Conference on Basic Writing. She currently serves as Chair of the English Department.

Bio:

Bio:

After publishing two books concerning slavery, manumission, and race in Virginia, I am shifting my focus northward to Americans’ ideas about free labor in the 18th and 19th centuries. My interest remains in the intersection between thought and action—in this case between ideas about labor and the increasing prevalence of wage labor (as opposed to bound labor such as slavery, servitude, and apprenticeship) in the northern region of the United States. Why, when labor had in the 1600s been seen as appropriate only for the lowly‐‐something difficult, filthy, and best avoided—did it come by the 1800s to be seen as something good, manly, and noble? I’m convinced that the answer has to do with both race and gender and that it helps explain why Americans today think working hard is such a good thing.

As a teacher, I also think that hard work is good, but I believe in weekends and breaks! I am passionately committed to helping students improve their writing and their critical thinking skills in all my classes. I am grateful to be able to work with the interesting and diverse group of students at SF State, where I have been teaching since 2002.

Education

• Ph.D. Harvard University, 2000
• B.A. UC Berkeley, 1992

Courses Recently Taught

Undergraduate:

• 120: U.S. to 1877
• 300: Seminar in Historical Analysis
• 422: The American Revolution
• 464: Race and Ethnic Relations
• 473: Unfree Labor in Early America
• 696: Proseminar, North versus South in the United States before the Civil War

Graduate:

• 700: History as a Field of Knowledge
• 780: Transition to Capitalism in the U.S. (reading seminar)
• 780: Ideology of the American Revolution (research seminar)

Research Interests

• Free-Labor Thought and Capitalism in the Early National U.S.
• Manumission and Free Blacks in Virginia
• Slavery
• American Revolution

Books:

• Almost Free: A Story About Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia. University of Georgia Press, 2012.
• Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. LSU Press, 2006.

Book Chapters:

• “Early Free-Labor Thought and the Contest over Slavery in the Early Republic,” in Matthew Mason and John Craig Hammond, eds., Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Freedom and Bondage in the New American Nation. University of Virginia Press, 2011.
• “Natural Politics: Thomas Jefferson, Elections, and the People,” in John B. Boles and Randal L. Hall, eds., Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours. University of Virginia Press, 2010.

Selected Professional Service

• J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship Committee, American Historical Association, 2010-2012.
• Editorial Board Memeber, Journal of Southern History, 2017-2019

Selected Community Service

• Phi Beta Kappa SF State chapter Secretary, 2013-present.
• Seminar Leader for Teaching American History grant seminars, various times 2006-2012.

Television and Radio Appearances

• Genealogy Roadshow, PBS, Episode 3, Oct. 7,  2013. See the bit on Benjamin Franklin at http://genealogyroadshow.org/episodes/san-francisco.
• Finding Your Roots, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., PBS May 13, 2012. See starting at 34:24 at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/video/john-legend-and-wanda-s...
• Who Do You Think You Are? with Blair Underwood, NBC, Feb. 24, 2012.
• “Here and Now,” WBUR, “Decades Before The Civil War, Virginia's Legislature Voted On Whether To End Slavery,” aired June 24, 2019.

Bio:

Bio:

Bio:

I'm a professor in the Humanities program (now part of the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies, of which I am currently Director), where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on American culture, music and society; literary and musical modernisms; literary and cultural theory. I recently spent 18 months in Ghana, teaching American literature and studying West African literature and culture. I am currently developing courses that are comparative not only in bringing American and W. African content together, but also in creating online spaces for interactions between students at SF State and at the University of Ghana.

My scholarly work has focused on music's place in American cultures and imaginations. In a series of articles and then my first book, Sounding Real: Musicality and American Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, I explored a pivotal moment in American music (with the rise of Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, "Indianist" composers, and American divas) as it was registered by and in American fiction. I am currently working on a new book (tentively called Democratizing Music: Émigré European Modernists and American Musical Literacy) that traces the efforts of a group of avant-garde émigré musicians to inform and reform American musical literacy in the decade immediately following their arrival in the 1930s.

My interest in music stems from my lifelong practice as a violinist and chamber musician. I have a Masters in Music Performance from the New England Conservatory and worked professionally in various orchestsras before, in part because of repetitive injuries to my hand, deciding to switch gears and head back to school. I received my Ph.D. from Yale in English Literature in 1997, and have been teaching at SF State ever since.