Hellen Lee-Keller joined the faculty in 2006 as an Assistant Professor of Multi-Ethnic Literatures in the English Department at California State University, Sacramento. She holds a doctorate in Literature with a concentration on Cultural Studies from University of California, San Diego. She earned a M.A. in Humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills. And she has two B.A. degrees in Fine Art and in French Studies from University of California, Santa Cruz and University of California, Irvine, respectively.

She teaches courses that emphasize the intersections between race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class formations in cultural production in the United States.

Her research interests focus on the intersections of regional, national, and transnational gender, racial, and immigration politics by analyzing late 19th- and 20th-century cultural representations of women’s work in the U.S. and the Caribbean.

Her publications include "Madness and the Mulâtre-Aristocrate: Haiti, Decolonization, and Women in Marie Chauvet's Amour" and "Civilizing Violence: 'The Haunted Valley'" (2006), which examines Ambrose Bierce's representation of the race, gender, civilization, and sexual anxieties on the frontier.

She has presented her research at several professional conferences including the Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, Association for Asian American Studies, African Literatures Association, MELUS, and Pacific Southwest Women's Studies Association. 

Please feel free to check out the various pages to help you start to get acquainted. Should you want to return to this home page, just click on the name above.

Come visit me in office hours! While I am more serious and focused on meeting the collective students' needs and the designated course objectives while in the classroom, I will be able to give you more individualized and informal attention in office hours.

Advance Furlough Notice

This year the CSU is suffering the most severe budget cuts in the history of the University.  Our Administration is attempting to manage these cuts by increasing student fees and requiring employees to take unpaid furlough days. I am required to NOT work nine days a semester.
                  
On furlough days, I am required to conduct no work activity, including important things—teaching, research, and service—and even the most mundane things, like answering emails.

This Notice is to help you plan your time with me accordingly. As a result the furloughs, I regret that I will completely unavailable on the following days during fall semester:

Please note that I must be completely unavailable, otherwise I could be officially reprimanded for "insubordination." I am not permitted to make up work that would normally be done on the furloughed day. So, if you email me on a furlough day, please email me again with the same message on the following day, so that it will not be "carried over" work. Other faculty may be willing to take this risk, but as junior faculty I simply cannot.