Field-Of-Study: American Literature

Randall Fuller, Chapman Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, is the author of Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists (Oxford UP, 2007), a co-edited collection of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journals (Ohio State UP, 2010), and From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (Oxford UP, 2011), which won the

From the late 1970s to the present, I have been passionate about doing interdisciplinary cultural and historical work on nineteenth-century American literature. There have been broad consistencies in my career, and re-energizing shifts and surprises, particularly the move that I made in the early 1990s into African American literary studies, while retaining my interests in

An interest in the relationship between literature and science was the beginning of my studies in American literature.  I enjoy viewing various aspects of this cultural conflict through the prism of particular authors. I began with a study of Robert Frost and his interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science in general and in Darwin in

Perhaps best known as the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, during his Guggenheim Fellowship term Ted Genoways will be working on America’s Poet During the Decisive Years of 1863-1865, the second volume of his study Walt Whitman and the Civil War, the first volume of which, America’s Poet During the Lost Years of 1860-1862),

Throughout her career, Betsy Erkkilä has enriched the study of American literature with her ability to see and convey the interconnections and cross influences between literature and political culture, particularly in regard to the work of Walt Whitman. During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, she will be completing a study of Revolutionary literature and politics. After

Richard M. Cook is a professor in the English Department of the University of Missouri, St. Louis. He will use his Guggenheim term to prepare an edition of Alfred Kazin’s journals and to work on a book exploring the connection between truth and expectation in journals and autobiographies. His Alfred Kazin: A Biography (Yale UP,

Vincent Carretta is a Professor of English at the University of Maryland, specializing in the literature, history, and culture of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Anglophone authors, particularly those of African descent. He plans to spend the tenure of his Guggenheim Fellowship researching and writing a biography of the pioneering African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley. During the first