Theresa Gaul , Ph.D.

Theresa Strouth Gaul is director of the Core Curriculum and professor of English at Texas Christian University. A scholar, teacher, academic leader and diversity and inclusion advocate, her research focuses on US women’s writing, early Indigenous writers, and letters as a literary form. Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818-1823 (2014), which received the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Scholarly Edition Award in 2015, and To Marry an Indian:  The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1825-1839 (2005) showcased her use of feminist methodologies for recovering archival manuscripts. She served as co-editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers from 2008-2015, editor of the book series Legacies of American Women Writers, volume editor for A Companion to American Literature, Vol A, Beginnings to 1820 (2020), and co-editor of Letters and Cultural Transformation, 1760-1860 (2009).

Professor Gaul is co-editor of a forthcoming book, Being in Relation: Indigenous Peoples, the Land, and Texas Christian University, 1873-2023, centering Indigenous perspectives of the history of her university’s relations with Native peoples. Her current research focuses on the nineteenth-century multicultural literary history of Texas.

At TCU, Professor Gaul led Women and Gender Studies from program to department status and created two majors during her six years as director, achievements for which she received the Michael R. Ferrari Award for Distinguished University Service and Leadership. She has chaired the English department, co-founded TCU’s Native American and Indigenous Peoples Initiatives, and was lead writer for TCU’s Quality Enhancement Project: Finding Ourselves in Community. As Director of the Core Curriculum since 2021, she led the first changes to the general education curriculum at TCU in two decades.

Winner of the Deans’ Teaching Award, Professor Gaul teaches courses on early and nineteenth-century American literature, U.S. women’s writing, and archival methods.

Education

Ph.D., English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
MA, English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
BA, English, St. Catherine University

Administrative Experience

Chair, Department of English, 2019-2021

Director, Women and Gender Studies, 2012-2018

Associate Chair, Department of English, 2005-2008

Sample of Courses Taught

Undergraduate: Native American Literatures, U.S. Women's Writing I and II, Multicultural Literatures of Early America, Life Writing in Early America, Early American Novel, The Scarlet Letter and Its Adaptations, Letters and Diaries, Nineteenth-Century U.S. Novels in a Global Context, Research Seminar in American Literature: Moby-Dick and its Contexts, Social Justice Movements in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Graduate-level: Epistolary Writings before the Civil War, American Novel I: Multicultural Novels, Cultural Encounters in the Archive, Literature Pedagogy

Areas of Focus

American Literature to 1900
Women's Writing
Race and Ethnic Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Native and Indigenous Studies
Epistolary Writings
Archival Methods
Textual Editing