A specialist in U.S. literature from 1840-1990, Maria Farland has taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Wesleyan Universities. She has been at Fordham University since 2000 and is a member of the Columbia Society of Fellows. She received her PhD from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins and her BA in American Studies from Amherst College, summa cum laude. 

Her forthcoming book, Degraded Heartland: Antipastoral, Agricultural Reform and the Rural Modern in U.S. Literature, 1840-1950 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), is a history of ideas of rural backwardness in terms of antipastoral as a literary mode. She is currently working on a literary history of the anti-psychiatry movement in the work of Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and other writers, and has completed a manuscript on literary modernism and brain science. A list of publications is available on Google Scholar.