Biography
Teresa Toulouse is a scholar of American literature from the colonial period through the Civil War. She taught twenty-nine years at Tulane. After Hurricane Katrina, she taught ten years at the University of Colorado, Boulder before retiring to New Orleans. She is the author of two monographs: The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (1987) and The Captive’s Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity and Royal Authority in Colonial New England (2007). She co-edited, with Andrew Delbanco, volume two of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1992). As long-time Director of the former Tulane American Studies Program, she developed and taught “New Orleans as a Cultural System” with Mac Heard, a nationally recognized course linking the School of Architecture with the interdisciplinary program in American Studies. Heard is honored in her current collection (co-edited with Barbara Ewell), Sweet Spots: In-between Spaces in New Orleans (2018). In 2017 she and Michael Zimmerman (Emeritus, Philosophy) co-edited (with Jason Gladstone) the interdisciplinary collection “Environmental Trajectories: Modes, Debates, Reconfigurations” in ELN, 55.1, Spring/Fall 2017. She is currently writing a monograph comparing settler-colonial and Iroquois (Mohawk) and Wampanoag understandings and practices of religious “devotion.” Toulouse’s areas of interest include not only the early periods in American writing and culture, but also literatures of American urbanism and environmental literatures.