19th Century

American Literatures and Cultures

The faculty and graduate students in the program in American literatures and cultures address a variety of literary traditions and cultural practices (such as the visual arts, religion, politics, and law) from national and transnational perspectives. We have strength in all historical periods. Our methodological approaches range from formal analysis of poetic, narrative, and generic structures, through comparatist approaches, to the historical analysis of gendered and racial subject formations in local and global contexts. Theoretical orientations include Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, materialist phenomenology, and aesthetic theory. Such orientations and approaches do not necessarily exclude one another; indeed, their principled convergence often enables especially productive analysis.

Faculty Members

Lauren Berlant

Research Interests: Cultural Studies | Critical Theory | Historicism| Psychoanalysis| Aesthetics of the Case and the Exemplum | Theory and History of Citizenship, Decolonization, Migration | African American Literature and Black Studies | 19th/20th C American Literature

Bill Brown

Research Interests: Research Interests: Marxism | Cinema Studies | History of Literary Criticism | Literature and the Arts | The Novel | Urban Studies | Visual Culture and Iconography

Alexis Chema

Research Interests: Gender and Sexuality | Eighteenth-Century British Literature | Romantic Literature | Victorian Literature | History of Ideas | History of the Book| Literary History | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and the Arts | Visual Culture and Iconography

Emily Coit

Research Interests: Nineteenth-century American Literature | Nineteenth-century British Literature | Literary History | Intellectual History | Prose Fiction | Nonfiction Prose

Elizabeth Helsinger

Josephine McDonagh

Research Interests: 19th century British literature| Politics of literary expression

Benjamin Morgan

Michael Murrin

Research Interests: Heroic Literature | Historicism (Old and New) | Colonial and Postcolonial Literature |Medieval Literature | Irish Literature | History of Literary Criticism | Poetry and Poetics| Travel Literature

Lawrence Rothfield

Research Interests: Cultural Policy Studies |Victorian Literature |History of Science |History of the Disciplines | The Novel

Joshua Scodel

Research Interests: Renaissance and Early Modern Literature| History of Ideas |History of Literary Criticism | Literature and Philosophy |Political Theory

Richard Strier

Research Interests: History of Ideas | History of Literary Criticism | Literature and Philosophy | Nonfiction Prose | Poetry and Poetics | Political Theory

William Veeder

Research Interests: 19th/20th Century American and British Literature | Victorian Literature | The Novel