Liberal Arts, Associate Professor

My Amriki: A Novel

Elizabeth’s work is a novel in progress set in Central Asia: My Amriki, whose three main protagonists are Westerners enacting dynamics of cultural appropriation or misperception as players in dramas involving antiquities theft; international adoption; and trauma recovery. One protagonist is a kidnapping survivor who travels to Central Asia to track his kidnaper. A second protagonist is on a mission to rescue national treasures from looting, while the third is seeking an illegal, international adoption. Each character seeks the region’s past, idealized or real, and in the process falls sway to quotidian error that amasses to become intractable predicament. Each, through increasingly off kilter, panic-inflected thinking, develops a megalomaniacal vision of his or her own as a savior of ruins literal or metaphorical.