Louise Barnett

Louise Barnett is a professor of American Studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.Professor Barnett’s primary field is nineteenth-century American culture, which she has pursued in a number of directions. Her first book, The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism (Greenwood Press, 1976), examined representations of Native American characters in the popular genre of the nineteenth-century frontier romance. A later work of literary criticism, Authority and Speech: Language, Society and Self in the American Novel (University of Georgia Press, 1993), investigated the relationship between authority and speech in novels from early in the nineteenth century to the 1970s. In 1996 Professor Barnett published her best known book, Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer (Henry Holt). Touched by Fire also appeared in paperback and was reissued in 2006 in paperback by the University of Nebraska Press. It won the 1996 John M. Carroll award of the Little Big Horn Associates for best book on Custer related studies and led to various tv appearances, most notably on C-Span’s Booknotes and an A&E biography of Custer. Another excursion into military history, Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army’s Notorious Incest Trial, was selected by New York Public Library as one of the year 2000’s twenty-five best books. Professor Barnett published Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women (Oxford, 2007) and Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia (Routledge 2010, paperback 2011). She is presently working on a book on nineteenth-century American marriages.