Lisa M. Botshon

Lisa Botshon
Title

Professor of English

Telephone (207) 621-3473
Address

Jewett Hall, Room 119
UMA Augusta Campus

Bio

Lisa Botshon is a Professor of English who teaches a wide variety of courses, including American literature, graphic storytelling, and women’s and gender studies. Her research interests include women writers; issues of gender, race and ethnicity; American popular culture; and early 20th-century back-to-the-land narratives.  She has published articles in a range of collections and scholarly journals, including Feminist Teacher, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Modern Fiction Studies. A collection, Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s, co-edited with Meredith Goldsmith, was published by Northeastern UP.  Her current book project focuses on Maine women rusticators of the 1940s.

During the 2009-2010 academic year, Dr. Botshon was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; she was awarded a second Fulbright to teach at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in spring 2018.

Conference Presentations

“‘Water Water Everywhere’: Plumbing and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Civilization of the Body,†Stowe in Context and Conversation, Stowe House, Hartford, CT, April 2026.

“‘Let us have our bath rooms’: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Prescient Plumbing,†Society for the Study of American Women Writers, Philadelphia, Nov. 2025.

“‘Queer Little Human Toy’: Katharine Butler Hathaway and the House that Made Her Life Rise,†Wellesley/Deerfield Symposium. Queer New England, Historic Deerfield, March 2024.

“Mid-Century Maine Rustication Narratives and the Making of the White Middle Class,†Wellesley/Deerfield Symposium. Homemaking: Race, Place, and Ethnicity in the New England Household, Wellesley College, March 4, 2023.

Other Scholarly Work

Organizer. “Maine’s Midcentury Moment,†an 11-event commemoration in honor of the State of Maine’s Bicentennial funded by an NEH Public Humanities Grant, January 2020-September 2021.

Conference co-organizer. “One sun rose on us today”: Stories from Maine’s Long 20th Century,†UMA and the University of Southern Maine, June 2021.

National Endowment for the Humanities, Public Humanities Grant: Maine’s Midcentury Moment, $100,000, 2019-2021.

Selected Publications

Scholarly Publications

"This is Not My Father's Literature Class: A Playbook for Change," Wording Otherness: Living and Learning in Dissimilitude Without Dissonance, eds. Michelle Gadpaille and Mojca Krevel, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024.

"Louise Dickinson Rich's Middlebrow House in the Big Woods," Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 38. 1-2, 2021: 90-111.

Education

B.A., Brandeis University.
M.A., Columbia University.
Ph.D., Columbia University.