English

EDUCATION:

Ph.D. the Johns Hopkins University, 1985

INTERESTS:

 American literature, especially colonial and nineteenth-century; social theory and media studies; the history of the book; queer theory and sexuality studies; secularism and religion.

My work ranges across a number of topics and styles, from scholarship in early American literature and print culture, to more theoretical writing about publics and social movements, to introductory editions and anthologies, to journalism and nonacademic political writing.  In connection with my work on print and the history of reading, I have been interested in several other disciplines, on topics such as new media, intellectual property.  One common thread across these fields is the way different social worlds are built up out of different circulating media and ways of reading or hearing.  At present I am working on a study of secularism.  It is partly a reflection on the dilemmas of secularism in the present; but that reflection is framed by a study of secular culture in America in the period before it was called secularism (roughly from the early eighteenth century to the Civil War).   This study will culminate with the work of Walt Whitman, a writer on whom so many of my interests converge.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--The Portable Walt Whitman (New York:  Penguin, 2003).

--Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2002).

--The Trouble with Normal (New York: The Free Press, 1999;  Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000).

--American Sermons (New York: Library of America, 1999).

-- The English Literatures of America (Routledge, 1997).
with Myra Jehlen

--Fear of a Queer Planet:  Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

--The Letters of the Republic:  Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

SELECTED ARTICLES:

-- "Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood" Curiouser (2004) 215-224.

--“What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003) 41-54.

--“Irving’s Posterity,” ELH 67 (2000) 773-799.

--"Whitman Drunk," from Publics and Counterpublics

 

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Colonial Literatures of America, Introduction to the Study of American Literature, Colonial Literatures of America