Stella Setka is an Associate Professor of English at West Los Angeles College. She holds a doctorate in English from Purdue University with an emphasis on ethnic American literature. U My first monograph, Empathy and the Phantasmic in Ethnic American Trauma Narratives, examines novels by black, Jewish, and Native American authors that use culturally specific forms of the supernatural as a way of connecting readers to historical traumas like slavery and genocide. Her central argument is that such texts—which she calls phantasmic trauma narratives—seek to elicit reader empathy and inspire ethical thinking.
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