Books

The View from the Mast-Head: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives, University of North Carolina Press (2008).

Editor, Horrors of Slavery, or, The American Tars in Tripoli (1808), by William Ray. Rutgers University Press, Subterranean Lives Series (2008).

Articles

“Douglass’s and Melville’s ‘Alphabets of the Blind,’” Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, eds. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 257-78.
 
"Melville and the Novel of the Sea," Cambridge History of the American Novel, eds. Leonard Cassuto, Clare Eby, and Benjamin Reiss (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

“American Graves, Pacific Plots,” American Literary Geographies: Space and Cultural Production, 1588-1888, eds. Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu (University of Delaware Press, 2007): 149-170.

“Before and After the Mast: James Fenimore Cooper and Ned Myers,” Pirates, Jack Tar, and Memory: New Directions in American Maritime History, eds. Paul A. Gilje and William Pencak (Mystic Seaport Museum, CT, 2007): 115-134.

“Atlantic Trade,” A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006): 113-128.

“Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and American Sea Narratives,” Early American Studies 1:2 (Fall 2003): 133-58.

Honors, Grants, and Awards

John Gardner Maritime Research Award for The View from the Masthead, 2008
NEH Summer Stipend, 2005
Reese Research Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, June 2004
Professional Development and Research Award, University of Tennessee, June-July 2003
Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 2001-2
Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, 1999-2000
Mellon Dissertation Proposal Summer Fellowship, 1998
Teaching Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 1996-98
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (National Mellon Fellow), 1995-96
Isidore and Helen Sacks Memorial Prize for the Best Senior Thesis in American Literature, Princeton University, 1995

Professional Activities

Mellon Foundation Maritime History symposium, “Exploring Digital Resources for Historiography and Instruction: Making the Ideal Real,” G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, CT, September 12-13, 2003; Symposium, February 4-5, 2005
Rare Book School, “History of the Book in America,” University of Virginia, July 7-11, 2003
National Humanities Center Summer Institute in Literary Studies, “Herman Melville's Moby-Dick,” Yale University, June 21-28, 2003
American Antiquarian Society Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in American Culture, “ Reading and Everyday Life: Books, Texts, Histories,” June 15-21, 2003

Recent Selected Presentations

"Polar Exploration's Hollow Core" (invited plenary talk), Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth, June 16-22, 2008
"William Ray of the Genus Irritabile Vatum" (invited talk), Notre Dame, April 3-5, 2008
"Israel Potter and the Atlantic World," ASA, Philadelphia, PA, October 11-14, 2007
“Holes in the Poles,” ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association), Puebla, Mexico, April 19-22, 2007
“Barbary Captivity and Intra-Atlantic Print Culture,” AHA (American Historical Association), Philadelphia, January 5-8, 2006
“A ‘Little Coterie’ at Sea: American Sailors' Literary Culture,” ASA, Washington, DC, November 3-6, 2005
“Douglass’s and Melville’s ‘Alphabets of the Blind,’” Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, New Bedford, MA, June 22-26, 2005
"Globalism’s Hollow Core: Symzonia and the Promise of Polar Exploration,” ASA, Atlanta, GA, November 11-14, 2004
“‘Misery’s Mathematics’: Melville’s Narrative of Statistics,” Society for the Study of Narrative Literature Conference, Burlington, VT, April 22-25, 2004
“‘The Literati of the Galley’: Sailors’ Reading, Sailors’ Writing,” MLA, San Diego, December 27-30, 2003
Chair, Respondent, and Organizer of Panel: Death and Discipline at Sea, ASA, Hartford, CT, October 16-19, 2003
“‘Uncoffin’d’ at Sea” (invited talk), C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, Washington College, MD, March 2003
“‘Robert Adams, an American Sailor’: The Authentic Subject in Barbary Captivity Narratives,” MLA, New York, December 27-30, 2002
“‘When you're captur'd by a Turk,/ Sit down, and write a better work’: Producing Barbary Captivity Narratives,” History of the Maritime Book Conference, Princeton, October 4-5, 2002
Chair and Co-Organizer of Special Session: Polar Exploration and Anglo-American Literature, MLA, New Orleans, December 27-30, 2001

Course Descriptions:

English 564: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Sentiment and Sensation in the Novel

The novels that were most ardently read by nineteenth-century Americans have been characterized as sentimental or sensational. Both sentimental and sensational literature demanded a strong emotional response from its readers, but the terms have been used very differently: sentimental fiction has been thought to be feminine, domestic, and private, while sensational literature is understood as masculine, violent, and public. In this course we will read the most popular works of fiction written in the nineteenth century in order to challenge the notion of whether men read (or wrote) differently than women. We will also consider why the traditional canon of nineteenth-century American literature been thought to be in strict opposition to sentimentalism, despite the genre's popularity. To this end, we will pay close attention to the print culture of sentimental and sensational writing: how the material text of the sentimental novel was produced, and in what format; how it circulated; and who read it.

English 564, Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
American Literary Periodicals

In this course we will read major works of nineteenth-century American literature within the context of the periodicals in which they were first published and read. Literary magazines became enormously significant over the course of the nineteenth century, and the story of their rise and expansion amplifies in important ways the history of American literature before 1900. Periodicals ensured that literary works became part of a wider exchange of ideas both within the pages of individual magazines, as well as through their circulation within a lively and variegated print culture. We will explore how the experience of reading or interpreting a work is affected by the articles, poems, and illustrations that surround it, and discuss how a periodical shapes or directs a reader's response to a given work. More broadly, students can expect to learn how to perform archival research, make use of historical as well as electronic resources, and understand the history of the book and of print culture in America.

We will study writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Judith Sargent Murray, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton), Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Sarah Orne Jewett, as well as the literary magazines in which their work first appeared, such as Massachusetts Magazine, United States Magazine, American Museum, Putnam's Monthly, Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, North American Review, United States Democratic Review , Scribner's , and Century Magazine.

English 300: Herman Melville and the Profession of Authorship

“It is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail,'” Herman Melville wrote in 1849, when his literary fame was still healthy. Why would Melville define literary success as failure? In this course we will read widely and deeply in the works of Herman Melville. We will pay special attention to the ways Melville's fiction and correspondence meditate on what it means to think of literary achievement in terms of professional success or failure. In addition to acquiring intimacy with Melville's body of work, students can expect a more broadly useful familiarity with antebellum American literature, as well as with the ways other American writers thought about the craft of writing as a professional act.

English 401: Studies in Genre
Captives, Travelers, Slaves: American Narrative Literature

This course will examine the genre of the first-person narrative in American literature, focusing primarily on travel narratives, slave narratives, and narratives of Indian captivity. What compelled certain Americans to record and publish the history of their own lives? Who read these stories? What made someone a worthy subject of literary attention? What do their individual narratives tell us about collective American experience? In the course of our reading we'll think about such questions as why Harvard student-turned-common sailor Richard Henry Dana chose the same literary form in telling his sea story, as Mary Rowlandson did to write about her trials as a captive of Native Americans. The narratives we will read avow their authenticity, and we will investigate how the form of the narrative genre is presumed to convey certain “truths.” Texts will include Equiano's Interesting Narrative , Herman Melville's Typee , James Riley's Sufferings in Africa , Mary Jemison's Narrative of Indian captivity, and Frederick Douglass's Narrative .