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Home > Our Faculty > Faculty Profiles > Frances CoganFrances Cogan
CURRENT RESEARCHProfessor Cogan's current research deals with testimony and the various unusual forms it can take rhetorically. She is working on a collection entitled Strange Testimonies which will consist of a number of separate essays around this central theme. Currently she has finished and submitted one, "Wainwright on MacArthur: Testimony Between the Lines" about Wainwright's condemnation of MacArthur through inference and connotation in Wainwright's biography. She has also finished and submitted a "somewhat wilder" one: the testimony of so-called space abductees. The piece is called "Captors from the Sky: Alien Abduction as Captivity Narrative."Currently Dr. Cogan is researching the historical background and the nineteenth century rhetorical patterns of the 19th century in order to study the work of Ann Eliza Young--one of Brigham Young's Mormon wives who ran away, supported herself by lecturing, and then wrote her book: Wife Number 19th. She intends to call this essay, "Apostasy as Testimony: The Ann Eliza Young Revelations." After this, Professor Cogan has two more essays to research and write--one involving 19th century Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco who were "saved" by Methodist missionaries and who then were forced to write a "confession" about their brutal lives with the Tongs if they (the girls) wanted to remain out of the clutches of the Tong lords. Unfortunately, the "confession" had a particular shape and set of required emotional expressions alien to the chinese prostitutes; to testify to what they had been through ended up beomg a christianized evangelical pamphlet story and not the truth. This "double-backed truth" is an interesting rhetorical scheme to examine. Her last essay, she believes, will deal with Judge Samuel Sewell, one of the judges of the 17th century witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Sometime after the Witchcraft Trials, he recanted, and asked forgiveness for hanging innocent men and women. She is interested in the dynamics of "Recantation as Testimony". PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHYProfessor Cogan's book, All American Girl (University of Georgia Press, 1989), an examination of the depiction of womanhood in mid-nineteenth century American literature, earned favorable national and international responses. The National Organization of American Historians nominated All-American Girl for the Merle Curti Award in Social History. Her newest book, Captured (University of Georgia Press, 2000), establishes her as scholar of the Japanese internment of American civilians in the Philippines. The latter book has earned strong initial reviews for its fine-grained analysis of internee narratives and the nature of camp life.Dr. Cogan has won every major teaching award at the University of Oregon, including the Ersted Award and the Burlington Northern Senior Faculty Teaching Award, as well as two "Professor of the Month" awards, the latest in 1998. She has offered new and innovative courses over the last five years, including "Seminar on the Literature of the Gothic", "Crime and Criminals in 19th century Fiction", and "Literature of Scepticism". She has served on a number of University and College committees, and chaired both the Faculty Library Committee and the community based Friends of the Library Committee. |
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