Biography

Joseph L. Coulombe teaches a wide variety of courses in U.S. literature, covering colonial writing to contemporary novels. He’s the author of three books: Humor and Gender in U.S. Fiction (Routledge 2024), Reading Native American Literature (Routledge 2011), and Mark Twain and the American West (U of Missouri Press 2003), and he has published multiple articles on writers such as Edith Wharton, Frederick Douglass, Philip Roth, Thomas King, Dorothy Parker, and Mark Twain. Both his scholarship and teaching explore how literary narratives position readers in relation to shifting ideologies of gender, race, nation, and region. Dr. Coulombe earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Delaware in 1998 and his B.A. from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1989. He began at Rowan University in 2001 after teaching for three years in western Tennessee. He originally hails from La Crosse, Wisconsin, a Mississippi River town.