Deborah Madsen

Deborah Madsen is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Deborah was born in Melbourne; she completed her BA and MA degrees at the University of Adelaide, and her PhD at the University of Sussex in England. Deborah taught at the University of Leicester and then at London South Bank University before moving to Geneva. Her research focuses upon gendered discourses of nationhood, multiculturalism, diaspora, and immigration. She is the author of a series of books addressing the rhetoric of American national belonging and is currently extending that work into the field of Transnationalism with a monograph about gender performativity and national embodiment as constituent discourses of Chinese diaspora. She wrote the Asian Australian Literatures chapter for A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900, (eds) Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer (2007); other publications include ‘“No Place Like Home”: The Ambivalent Rhetoric of Hospitality in the Work of Simone Lazaroo, Arlene Chai, and Hsu-Ming Teo’, in the 2006 special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies, ‘Locating Asian Australian Cultures’, edited by Tseen Khoo; as well as essays on Chinese Canadian and Chinese American issues.