Trinyan Paulsen Mariano

Assistant Professor
WMS 323
tmariano@fsu.edu
19th- and early 20th- century American literature and popular culture; legal literature and rhetoric; Southern studies; critical race theory; segregation narratives; literary romance; theories of pain; trauma theory; literary cartographies

TRINYAN PAULSEN MARIANO, Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Rutgers University, Newark; J.D., Brigham Young University, specializes in American literature and culture from the Revolution through the mid-twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the technologies through which fiction governs notions law and social justice. Among the courses she teaches are nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, the novel, law and literature, and popular literary culture. Recently, her upper-division and graduate courses have focused on pursuing a coherent framework for understanding the segregation narrative. Her current research takes up the timely topic of (non)reparations for slavery, a project that intersects with New Southern and popular culture studies as it examines the many resources in legal signification generated by popular nineteenth-century southern plantation romance and contends that the romance took a prominent role in cognizing injury and obligation in ways that made reparations for slavery unthinkable.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

  • The Lost Moment of Repair. 110,000-word book manuscript
  • “Statutes of Repose and the Temporality of Obligation in Kate Chopin’s Louisiana Fiction.”
  • “Romancing Injury: Judicial Distress and Expropriated Pain.”
  • “Edith Wharton’s Secret of Secrets: Mail, Blackmail, and the Discourse of Privacy.”

PUBLICATIONS

  • “Persons in the Balance: The Scale of Justice in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition.” Chapter in Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt, Susanna Ashton and Bill Hartwig, eds. Winter 2017 (Modern Language Association).
  • “Fictions of Race and Personality: Nineteenth-Century Law and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.” Chapter in Law and the Humanities, Nan Goodman and Simon Stern, eds. 2017 (Routledge).
  • "The Law of Torts and the Logic of Lynching in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition." PMLA 128.3 (2013): 559-574.
  • "Legal Realism and the Rhetoric of Judicial Neutrality: Richard Wright's Challenge to American Jurisprudence." The British Journal of American Legal Studies 1.2 (2012): 467-516.

SELECT PRESENTATIONS

  • “Time as a Unit of Justice in Kate Chopin’s At Fault.“ American Literature Association: San Francisco, CA. May 2018.
  • “The Philosophical Basis of Privacy and the Violable Self in Nathanael Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.” Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities: Palo Alto, CA. March 2018.
  • “Transgenerational Geographies of Law in the Segregation Narrative,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities: Hartford, CT. Apr 2016.
  • “Toni Morrison and the Labor of Community in Paradise.” Symposium on Literature, Labor, and the Law. John Jay College of Criminal Justice: New York, NY. Oct-Nov 2015. (Invited)
  • "Edith Wharton's Secret of Secrets: Mail, Blackmail, and the Discourse of Privacy," American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, May 2013.
  • "Imperium and Dominium: A Jurisprudential Approach to the Segregation Narrative," Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, New Brunswick, NJ, April 2013.

HONORS AND AWARDS

  • Council on Research and Creativity Fellowship, Florida State University, 2014
  • University Award for Excellence in Teaching, Rutgers University, 2009
  • Mellon Foundation Fellow in Historical Interpretation, Rutgers University, 2008
  • Mellon Foundation Summer Fellow, Princeton University, 2007
  • Mellon Foundation Summer Fellow, Rutgers University, 2003-2004