UC San Diego

In my dissertation, “The Elite Domestic Sphere: Identity, Memory and Nostalgia in Literatures of U.S. Empire 1885-1915,” I bring together three locations of U.S. empire: California, Hawai'i and Panama, to analyze how women respond to the displacement by U.S. empire through nostalgic representations of the domestic sphere. By looking at a variety of genres including fiction, autobiography and history I argue that the essentialization of elite class status happens through the imagining of a past idealized domestic sphere.