Trial by Army: Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia London: Routledge, 2010.

Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women, New York: Oxford University Press, January, 2007.

Jonathan Swift was the subject of gossip and criticism in his own time concerning his relations with women and his representations of them in his writings. For over twenty years he regarded Esther Johnson, "Stella," as "his most valuable friend," yet he is reputed never to have seen her alone. From his time to our own there has been speculation that the two were secretly married--since their relationship seemed so inexplicable then and now. For thirteen of the years that Swift seemed committed to Stella as the acknowledged woman in his life, he maintained a clandestine--but apparently also nonsexual--relationship with another woman, Esther Van Homrigh, or "Vanessa." Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women looks again at these much-examined relationships and at others that reveal Swift as a man who enjoyed the company of a number of women as pupils and as ministrants to his various needs.

Swift, a man with a complex private life, was also a writer whose satiric portraits of women could be unsparing. While Swift often criticized women for frivolous pastimes and idle chatter, his most notorious texts on women image their bodies as loathsome: as he once wrote in a serious political tract, a woman is a "nauseous, unwholesome carcass." Such representations cross a line by showing a repugnance for women as a sex, the biological other. They have led, not surprisingly, to repeated charges of misogyny, an issue that Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women addresses at some length. This first book-length treatment of Swift and women comprehensively examines Swift's attitude toward women in all their manifestations in his work and life: as intimates, acquaintances, protégés, wives, mothers, nurses, disobedient daughters, young women who marry older men, and--finally--as poets and critics.

Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer. New Edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Bison Book, August, 2006, with new preface, v-xi.

• Original Edition: New York: Henry Holt, 1996; paperback edition, 1997.
• also published in an Italian edition as Custer: L'Ultimo Eroe (Milan: Rizzoli, 1999.)

For more than a century, Americans have been captivated by the legend of General George Armstrong Custer. Since the end of the long afternoon of June 25, 1876, when his small band of 267 men faced some 3,000 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in a remote corner of Montana, Custer has held a place in the pantheon of America's great figures, and the Last Stand has endured as one of the primary images of American expansion into the western frontier. Alternately invoked as the personification of absolute folly and pure bravery, Custer resonates in our national imagination yet eludes simple definition - each generation recasts the man and his death according to its need for a particular vision of America. Touched by Fire undertakes the search for, as one historian put it, "a man waiting to be discovered" between the extremes of his experience. Renowned for his love of pranks at West Point, where he graduated last in his class, Custer had a flair for heroic achievement that brought him phenomenal glory in the Civil War as one of the Union's youngest generals, but left him mostly frustrated on the lonely plains. Professor Louise Barnett traces all the complexities of this erratic personality, fully incorporating into her account his wife, Elizabeth Bacon Custer - "Libbie" - whose unusual spousal devotion endured through fifty-seven years of widowhood. Bringing a new racial perspective to Custer's legend and including new material that surfaced in archaeological excavations of the battlefields in the 1980s, Professor Barnett attempts to understand how a man famed for brilliant military performance came to wage an impossible attack near a small stream called the Little Bighorn. Beyond the transfixing moment of the Last Stand, Professor Barnett shows us another Custer who equally seizes the imagination.

Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. Paperback edition April, 2001.

The shocking story behind the U.S. Army's longest court-martial—full of sex, intrigue, and betrayal. In April 1879, on a remote military base in west Texas, a decorated army officer of dubious moral reputation faced a court-martial. The trial involved shocking issues—of sex and seduction, incest and abduction. The highest figures in the United States Army got involved, and General William Tecumseh Sherman himself made it his personal mission to see that Captain Andrew Geddes was punished for his alleged crime.

But just what had Geddes done? He had spoken out about an "unspeakable" act—he had accused a fellow officer, Louis Orleman, of incest with his teenage daughter, Lillie. The army quickly charged not Orleman but Geddes with "conduct unbecoming a gentleman," for his accusation had come about only because Orleman was at the same time preparing to charge that Geddes himself had attempted the seduction and abduction of the same young lady. Which man was the villain and which the savior?

Professor Louise Barnett's compelling examination of the Geddes drama is at once a suspenseful narrative of a very important trial and a study of prevailing attitudes toward sexuality, parental discipline, the army, and the appropriate division between public and private life. It will enrich any reader's understanding of the tumultuous post-Civil War period, when the United States was striving to define its moral codes anew.

Authority and Speech: Language, Society, and Self in the American Novel. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

This book examines speech in the American novel as an arena of struggle between individual expression and social authority. Discussing the full range of mainstream American novels, Professor Louise K. Barnett shows how the confident verbalism of the mid-nineteenth-century novel gives way to an increasing skepticism about language and its capacity to articulate experience and communicate. Her study is grounded in two related theoretical bases: speech-act theory, which seeks to assess the authority of utterances by determining their relationship to constitutive rules, and sociolinguistics, which approaches the same issue of authority from the perspective of social requirements. Proceeding chronologically, the author begins with the major antebellum romantic writers - Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe - whose characters can express themselves as individuals and make successful use of "public language," that is, the type of language that functions prescriptively to maintain the values and attitudes of society at large. According to Professor Barnett, the works of Herman Melville are transitional in terms of speech because they move from the verbal confidence of his early writings to various forms of linguistic withdrawal in his late novels: the corruption of the word in The Confidence-Man, the tragic failure of communication in Billy Budd. Melville's striking modernity, however, was neither fully realized nor assimilated by other writers of his time. Rather, the key figure in confronting the problematic issues of speech and authority was Mark Twain, whose Huckleberry Finn (1884) offered a powerful critique of a falsifying public language that contaminated all discourses. Twain's novel also set the stage for a verbal skepticism that came to characterize many important modern texts, including The Ambassadors, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Hamlet and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise Barnett, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

New World Journeys: Contemporary Italian Writers and the Experience of America, coedited and trans.Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978.

The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790-1890. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976.

Books

Critical Essays on the Art of Leslie Marmon Silko, coedited with Jim Thorson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Paperback edition August, 2001.

Chapters in Books

• “Introduction,” John Koster, Custer Survivor (Palisades, New York: History Publishing Co., 2009): iii-xi.
• “Bartleby as Alienated Worker,” in Great Ideas, ed. William Vesterman. NY: Pearson, Longman, 2007: 47-54.
• "Indians, 1820-1870," American Literary Voices, ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattlemeyer, Scribner's, 2006.
• "Language, Gender, and Society in The House of Mirth," in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, ed. Linda Pavloski. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2004.
• "Custer as Judge," Twelfth Annual Symposium on Custer (Hardin, Mt.: Custer Battlefield Historical and Museum Society, 1999): 25-34.
• "Custer," in Booknotes, Life Stories: Notable Biographers on the People Who Shaped America (New York: Random House, 1999): 124-28.
• "Caddy and Nancy: Race, Gender, and Personal Identity in 'That Evening Sun' and The Sound and the Fury", in Approaches to Teaching The Sound and the Fury, ed. Stephen Hahn and Arthur F. Kinney. New York: Modern Language Association, 1996: 134-39.
• "Speech as Ideal Discourse in The Deerslayer", in Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier, ed. Eric Heyne. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992: 19-28; 158-59.
• "Caddy Compson: The Artist's Favorite Mask," in The Artist and his Masks: William Faulkner's Metafictions. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Faulkner, ed. Agostino Lombardo. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991: 165-76.
• "Voyeurism as Entrapment in Swift's Poetry," in Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carl R. Kropf. New York: AMS Press, 1991: 44-61.
• "Pier Paolo Pasolini: Aspects of a Semiology of Cinema," in Writing in a Film Age: Essays by Contemporary Novelists, ed. Keith Cohen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991: 191-226; rpt. from Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise Barnett, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise Barnett.
• "Deconstructing Gulliver's Travels: Modern Readers and the Problematic of Genre," in The Genres of Gulliver's Travels, ed. Frederik N. Smith. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1990: 230-45.
• "Da Corleone al Siciliano: il romanzo novecentesco americano ambientato in Sicilia," Il Magnifico Crawford: Scrittore per Mestiere, ed. Gordon Poole. Naples: University of Naples Orientale, 1990: 65-70.
• "Speech, Society, and Self-Image in The Great Gatsby," in Birth of Which Nation? America's Self-Images, 1865-1929, ed. Stefania Piccinato, et al. Atti del Nono Convegno Biennale. Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani. Perugia: Edizioni Guerra, 1989: 303-15.
• "Speech in Moby-Dick," in Modern Critical Interpretations: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986: 107-118.
• "Fictive Self-Portraiture in the Poetry of Jonathan Swift," in Contemporary Studies of Swift's Poetry, ed. John Irwin Fischer, Donald C. Mell, and David M. Vieth. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981: 101-11.
• "Nineteenth-Century Indian Hater Fiction: A Paradigm for Racism," in Words in Action, ed. Martin Steinman. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979: 337-47.

• Selected Fulbright Program Senior Specialist, November 2007-
• Faculty Fellow: Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. 2005-2006
• Visiting Fellow: Ernestine Richter Avery Fellowship, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, June 2004
• Visiting Fellow: Frederick A. and Marion S. Pottle Fellowship, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, January 2004
• Selected Author, New York Public Library "25 Most Memorable Books of 2000," April 20, 2001, for Ungentlemanly Acts
• Featured Author, Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, November 10-12, 2000
• Research Associate, Department of American Studies, Franklin and Marshall College, 2000-
• Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, 1998-99
• Touched by Fire used as historical background for moot court trial of George Armstrong Custer, presided over by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Indiana University Law School, September 19, 1998
• Touched by Fire awarded the John M. Carroll Prize of the Little Big Horn Associates for best book in its field in 1996
• Authority and Speech nominated for Rene Wellek prize of the American Comparative Literature Association and the James Russell Lowell prize of the Modern Language Association, 1993
• Heretical Empiricism (edition) selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books published in 1988
• Fulbright-Hays research fellowship, University of Bologna (1982-83): declined acceptance
• American Philosophical Society grant, 1974
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1974
• Fulbright-Hays research fellowship, University of Rome, 1971-72
• American Association of University Women Dissertation Year Fellowship, 1970-71
• Bryn Mawr College Fellowship for Graduate Study, 1968-71

• Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D. in English and American Literature
• University of North Carolina, M.A., B.A.