Cynthia Callahan
Associate Professor
Cynthia Callahan earned her PhD at the University of Delaware and her BA at Rutgers University (Douglass College). She teaches American and multi-ethnic American literatures. Her book, Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption in American Literature (University of Michigan Press, 2011), explores the role of adoptive kinship in articulating racial and national identities in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. She guest edited the first all-bibliography and review issue of the journal Adoption & Culture (Vol. 4, 2014). She is national co-chair of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture.
Research
Callahan, Cynthia. “Adoption, Abortion, and Ambivalence: Processing the Dobbs Decision.” Adoption & Culture, vol. 10, no. 2, 2022, 237-44, Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ado.2022.0023.
Callahan, Cynthia. “Nice White Lady: Whiteness and Domestic Transracial Adoption in Helen Doss’s The Family Nobody Wanted.” Adoption & Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2022, pp. 43-63.
Callahan, Cynthia. “’Bad Seeds’ and Wayward Boys in Postwar Adoption Fiction.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 67, no. 1, 2021, pp.75-99.