Rate My Professor Rebecca Lush

Rebecca Lush is Full Professor and Chair of the Department of Literature and Writing Studies in the College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences at California State University, San Marcos. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland, where she received the Geyer Prize for her dissertation. Lush also serves as Faculty Center Director and holds affiliate faculty positions in Ethnic Studies, Environmental Studies, and Film Studies. Her teaching and research interests include early colonial and U.S. American literature, 20th-century and contemporary American literature, American ethnic literature, speculative literature (science fiction/fantasy), the Western genre, and gothic/horror. As a leader in her field, she is co-president of the Western Literature Association, a past president of the organization, and vice president of the Stephen Graham Jones Author Society.

Lush's scholarship centers on the weird western genre, a hybrid form that infuses traditional Western narratives with speculative fiction elements such as science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror to interrogate race, gender, colonial frameworks, and social justice issues. She co-edited Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre with Michael Johnson, Sara Spurgeon, and Kerry Fine (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which was nominated for a Locus Award in the best nonfiction category, and contributed the introduction and a chapter on racial metaphors in media like Wynonna Earp and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Other notable publications include co-editing Margaret Fell: Women's Speaking Justified and Other Pamphlets with Jane Donawerth (Iter Press, 2018); the chapter “’Cause The Lie Becomes The Truth’: Dead Celebrities and Horror Archetypes” in A Critical Companion to the Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones (University of New Mexico Press, 2016); “The Royal Frontier: Colonist and Native Relations in Aphra Behn’s Virginia” in Before the West Was West (University of Nebraska Press, 2014); and refereed articles such as “Original sin: Frontier horror, gothic Anxiety, and colonial monsters in The Vampire Diaries” (Horror Studies, 2017) and “Turning Tricks: Sexuality and Trickster Language in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus” (Studies in American Indian Literatures, 2012). She was selected as the Society of Early Americanists Scholar of the Month in April 2018 and has presented papers at conferences including the Western Literature Association and Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.