Qualifications
Research Interests
My first book, 'Gilded Prostitution: Money, Migration and Marriage, 1870-1914' (Routledge, 1989) was a study of transatlantic relations and culture focusing on American women who married into the British peerage. I followed this up with a study of American women in the bourgeois elite, concentrating on New York City and drawing upon the fiction of Edith Wharton, entitled Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York (Routledge, 1998). My current book project, Whiteness and Politeness: The Racialization of Civilization, 1880-1930, is another venture into the cultural history of the period and examines travel literature, etiquette manuals, and novels of manners as a way of understanding how the American bourgeois elite conceptualized national identity at a time of fraught racial tensions.
Recent Publications
- Montgomery ME. (2016) Possessing Italy: Wharton and American Tourists. In Goldsmith M; Orlando E (Ed.), Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (1st ed.): 192-231. Gainesville: University Press ofo Florida.
- Montgomery ME. (2015) An American Witness: Edith Wharton and World War One. Salve Regina University, Newport, RI, USA: McGinty Distinguished Chair Lecture.
- Montgomery ME. (2015) Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers and the American Siege of London. Edith Wharton Restoration Society, The Mount, Lenox, MA, USA: Lecture Series.
- Montgomery ME. (2015) An American Witness: Edith Wharton and World War One. Christchurch, New Zealand: New Zealand Historical Association Conference (NZHA), 2-4 Dec 2015.
- Montgomery ME. (2015) Eyes that have seen what one dare not picture": How Wharton and Hemingway tell a true war story in "Coming Home" and "Soldier's Home. Boston, MA, USA: American Literature Association, 22-22 May 2015.