Alison
Graham-Bertolini, Ph.D.
Submerged and comin' up “saved”
Submerged: Drowning and Rebirth of Southern Women in Literature
coming soon · by Alison Graham-Bertolini
a new book
Submerged: Drowning and Rebirth of Southern Women in Literature
Submerged traces a recurring figure across more than a century of literature by women of the American South: the drowned, submerged, or dissolving woman. From Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier walking into the Gulf, to Jesmyn Ward's Baptiste family navigating the floodwaters of the Mississippi coast, Southern women writers return to scenes of submersion — where women sink beneath the surface of social expectation, racial violence, and the weight of history.
I argue that this pattern operates on two levels. In one tradition, submersion is a metaphor for drowned potential: girls and young women consumed by forces that objectify and diminish them, fading into the status quo. In another, Black and Caribbean women writers deepen the metaphor by engaging the collective trauma of the Middle Passage — transforming water from a site of individual dissolution into a medium of diasporic memory and communal reclamation.
Drawing on feminist literary criticism, scholarship on racial justice, and the emerging framework of hydrofeminism, Submerged offers close readings of Kate Chopin, Grace King, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Jesmyn Ward, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jamaica Kincaid.
"Comin' up saved" — used ironically. The women in these novels are not always saved by surfacing. The saving is not always what it seems.
Water as memory.
Water as inheritance.
Water as the long, slow weight of history.
the library
Earlier volumes
Hover, and the spine reveals itself.
Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction
Palgrave Macmillan · 2011
A study of women who take justice into their own hands across American fiction — what they reclaim, and what it costs them.
view on amazon →
Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century
Palgrave Macmillan · 2016 · edited
A gathering of new scholarship on McCullers's enduring relevance to questions of gender, queerness, and Southern identity.
view on amazon →
Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers
Mercer University Press · 2020
Finalist, Foreword INDIES Book Award in Women's Studies.
view on amazon →
in progress
Submerged: Race, Gender, and Metaphor in Southern Women's Fiction
monograph in progress
Illness and Dis/ability in Southern Women's Literature
co-edited with Dr. Casey Kayser
the scholar
A long way from Baton Rouge.
Fargo, North Dakota
I'm a scholar of American literature specializing in fiction by women of the U.S. South. My research explores how Southern women writers use metaphor, landscape, and the body to navigate questions of race, gender, disability, and belonging — scholarship connecting to a broader commitment.
I'm a Full Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at North Dakota State University, where I have served as Director of Graduate Studies in English since 2022. Internationally, I sit on the executive committee of the Contemporary Women's Writing Association and serve as a guest judge for the CWWA's Emerging Scholar Essay Prize, published through Oxford University Press. I'm also on the advisory board of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia, where I previously served as president of the Carson McCullers Society.
I'm a first-generation American — stitched together from English rainclouds and Australian sunlight. I did my graduate work at LSU and taught at Tulane before moving to the Northern Plains in 2013.
I now haunt the northern plains with a stack of novels and an overdeveloped appreciation for crumbling mansions, suspicious attics, family sins best left buried, and emotionally unstable narrators.
teaching & mentoring
Classrooms where students leave asking different questions than the ones they came in with.
I teach across American literature, Southern studies, and Women and Gender Studies — with regular graduate seminars in American Women Writers, Southern Gothic Literature, Native American Literature, and Women's Resistance Literature. Undergraduate courses range from Introduction to American Fiction to Ethnic American Literature and Transnational/Global Women.
Mentoring graduate students is one of the most meaningful parts of my work. I've directed over fifteen Master's theses and am currently chairing my first doctoral dissertation. Several of my advisees have won NDSU's English Research Award, and graduates of our program have gone on to doctoral study at Northwestern, UConn, UMass Amherst, USC, Ohio State, and elsewhere.
As Director of Graduate Studies, I've revised PhD exam procedures, reinstated the English Graduate Organization, and built recruitment pipelines. Graduate education, to me, is not just intellectual training — it is professional formation. I try to create conditions in which students can do their best thinking.
community & advocacy
Scholarship, connected to a broader commitment.
- 2020 – 2025Co-founder, NDSU Anti-Racism Coalition
Continued learning initiatives, discussion groups, and campus programming around racial justice.
- ongoingSafe Zone & Community of Respect trainings
Co-instructor for faculty trainings on inclusion and equity.
- Faculty Fellow yearOffice of Faculty Affairs and Equity
Developed anti-racism orientation content for incoming students and led Upstander Training sessions for faculty and staff.
- servedTitle IX complaint investigator
- beyond the universityCommunity organizing & facilitation
Discussions, film screenings, and events on topics from transgender rights to the history of women's suffrage in North Dakota.
- longtimeMoms Demand Action · Homeward Animal Shelter
Volunteer.
correspondence
Surface, and write.
For research inquiries, speaking, mentorship, or press —
alison.bertolini@ndsu.edu