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Dr. Russ has published scholarly articles on Dominican and Dominican American writers, transnationalism, and trans-American literary themes and tropes, among other topics. Her book, The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2009), examines the plantation, that physical place most vividly associated with slavery in the Americas, as a vexing rhetorical, ideological, and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World have been told. Dr. Russ is currently working on a second book, which analyzes representations of gender, race, and national identity in 20th-century literature written by women from the Dominican Republic. Dr. Russ teaches classes in her areas of expertise, as well as on all aspects of Hispanic language and cultures. She also team teaches a course on the city of Dallas for the University Honors Program.

Areas of Interest

• Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora cultures and literatures, with a special emphasis on the Dominican Republic
• Comparative literature of the Americas
• Latin American women writers
• Race, gender and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial societies

Publications and Presentations

• “The Ambivalence of Bodies in the Novels of Rita Indiana.” Latin American Studies Association Conference, San Francisco, March 2025.

• “Contesting Dominican Identity from the Borderlands in Rita Indiana’s Nombres y animales,” Modern Language Association Conference, New Orleans, January 2025.

• “Ecological Agency as Resistance? New Futures versus Old Problems in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé,” Latin American Studies Association Conference, Bogotá, Colombia, June 2024.

• “Between Frivolity and Resolve: The Contradictions of Abigaíl Mejía’s Intellectual Legacy.” Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference, Boston, March 2024.

• “Telling Other Stories: Dominican Black Cosmopolitanism in Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s Tablero (1978).” PMLA Volume 138, Issue 5 (October 2023): 1110-1126.

• “Eluding Whiteness in Jeannette Miller’s Color de piel.” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas Volume 56, No. 1 (Spring 2023): 32-38.

• Panelist, Roundtable on “Building Professional Dispositions for Undergraduate Humanities Majors,” Modern Language Association Conference, Washington D.C., January 2023.

• “Aída Cartagena Portalatín’s Publishing Legacy, 1940s-1980s,” Dominican Studies Association Conference, Virtual/Hostos Community College, Bronx, NY, December 2022.

• Panelist, Roundtable on “World Languages, World Literature, and Comparative Literature,” Modern Language Association Conference, Washington D.C., January 2022.

• “Negotiating Other Borders in Julia Alvarez’s A Wedding in Haiti,” Modern Language Association Conference, Washington D.C., January 2022.

• “Ecological Agency versus Anthropocentric Subjectivity in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé.” Modern Language Association Conference, Virtual, January 2021.

• “‘The tam-tam of drums fromthe West’: Shifting representations of Haiti in the Later Work of Aída Cartagena Portalatín.” Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies. Eds. April Mayes and Kiran Jayaram. UP of Florida, 2018. 

• “Between the Unthinkable and the Unsayable: The Legacy of Brigadas Dominicanas (December 1961-March 1963).” Hispanic Review 84.4 (Autumn 2016): 381-402.