Books

Early American Writings . General Editor. Associate Editors Angela Vietto and Amy E. Winans. New York : Oxford University Press, 2002. Anthology of readings.

Finding Colonial Americas : Essays Honoring J.A. Leo Lemay . Edited with David Shields. Newark : University of Delaware Press, 2001. Edited collection of essays.

Teaching the Literatures of Early America , MLA Options in Teaching Series. New York : Modern Language Association of America , 1999. Edited collection.

American Women Prose Writers to 1820 , vol. 200, Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Edited with Angela Vietto and Amy E. Winans. Detroit , Washington , DC , and London : Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1998. Edited reference book.

William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy ( 1789) and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797) . Penguin Classics series. New York and London : Viking-Penguin, 1996. Critical, scholarly edition and textbook of two well-known early American novels.

Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton . Charlottesville and London : University Press of Virginia , 1995. Scholarly study and edition setting Stockton canon and reconfiguring scholarly evaluation of manuscript culture and “publication” for women.

John Leacock's The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times , 1774-1775. Newark : University of Delaware Press, 1987. Critical, scholarly edition of American revolutionary propaganda series, published anonymously by a relative of Benjamin Franklin.

The Heath Anthology of American Literature , 2 vols., Paul Lauter, et al., eds. Lexington , Mass. : D.C. Heath and Co., 1990. Fifth Edition, 2006, published by Houghton Mifflin. Edited pre-nineteenth-century materials for editions 1-3.

 

Articles

• “Writing Women in Early American Studies: On Canons, Feminist Critique, and the Work of Writing Women into History,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. [forthcoming; 15 typescript pages]
• “Print and Manuscript Cultures in British North America .” In The Oxford Handbook to Early American Literature , ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Oxford University Press . [forthcoming; 45 typescript pages]
• “Benjamin Franklin, Traditions of Liberalism, and Women's Learning in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia.” In Educating the Youth of Pennsylvania : Worlds of Learning in the Age of Franklin , ed. John Pollack and Michael Ryan. University of Pennsylvania Press . [forthcoming; 34 typescript pages]
• “Benjamin Franklin , Pennsylvania Germans, and the Ethnic Origins of Nations.” In Halle Pietism, Colonial North America , and the Young United States. USA Studien 15. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe. Stuttgart : Steiner. [forthcoming; 23 typescript pages]
• “Pox and ‘Hell-Fire': Boston 's Smallpox Controversy, the New Science, and Early Modern Liberalism.” In Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America . Ed. Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris. Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Pages 7-27.
• “George Washington, the South, and the Poetics of National Memory.” In George Washington's South . Ed. Tamara Harvey and Greg O'Brien. Gainesville : University Press of Florida , 2004. Pages 316-65.
• “Of Nature and of Nations: Anglicization, Creolization, and Finding an American Identity in Eighteenth-Century British America .” In Do the Americas Have a Common Literary History? Ed. Barbara Buchenau and Annette Paatz. Frankfurt-am-Main and New York : Lang, 2002. Pages 61-94.
• “Benjamin Franklin, Native Americans, and the Commerce of Civility.” In Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775-1815 . Ed. W. M. Verhoeven. Houndsmills , England , and New York : Palgrave Press, of St. Martin 's Press, 2002. Pages 48-61.
• “Imagining Benjamin Franklin,” Afterword in Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings . Ed. L. Jesse Lemisch. Signet Classics edition. New York : New American Library, 2001. Pages 344-52.
• “New Science and the Question of Identity in Eighteenth-Century British America .” In Finding Colonial Americas : Essays Honoring J.A. Leo Lemay . Ed. Carla Mulford and David Shields. Newark : University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pages 79-103.
• “The Ineluctability of the Peoples' Stories,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3d ser., 57 (July 2000), 621-34.
• “Über Natur und Nationen: Anglisierung, Kreolisierung und das Finden einer amerikanischen Identität im Anglo-Amerika des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Trans. Armin Paul Frank. In Muster und Funktionen kultureller Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung: Beiträge zur internationalen Geschichte der sprachlichen und literarischen Emanzipation. Ed. Fritz Paul and Ulrike-Christine Sander. Göttingen , Germany : Wallstein Verlag, 2000. Pages 467-78.
• “ Franklin , Women, and American Cultural Myths.” In Benjamin Franklin and Women . Ed. Larry E. Tise . University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Pages 104-28, 161-66.
• “Benjamin Franklin, Native Americans, and European Cultures of Civility.” Prospects 24 (1999), 49-66.
• “Resisting Colonialism.” In Teaching the Literatures of Early America . Ed. Carla Mulford. New York : Modern Language Association, 1999. Pages 75-94.
• “Introduction.” In Teaching the Literatures of Early America . Ed. Carla Mulford. New York: Modern Language Association, 1999. Pages 1-6.
• “Figuring Benjamin Franklin in American Cultural Memory,” New England Quarterly 71 (1999), 415-43.
• “Franklin, Modernity, and Themes of Dissent in the Early Modern Era,” Modern Language Studies 28.2 (1998), 13-27.
• “Benjamin Franklin and the Myths of Nationhood.” In Making America / Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper . Ed. A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven. Amsterdam and Athens, Ga.: Rodopi, 1996. Pages 15-58.
• “ Huehuetlatolli , Early American Studies, and the Problem of History,” with “New Directions in Early American Studies,” Early American Literature 30 (1995), 145-51.
• “Joel Barlow and Masonic Conspiracy.” In Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies . Ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Hugh Ormsby-Lennon. New York: AMS Press, 1995. Pages 169-87.
• Forum in Teaching Early American Writings, Introduction: “The Uses of the Spanish Imperial Past in the Early ‘American' Classroom,” Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter , No. 12 (Fall,1994), 1-2. Available on www : www.georgetown.edu/tamlit/essays/forum_intro.html
• “Recovering the Colonial, Beginning Again: On Teaching American Writings to 1800,” Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter , No. 11 (Spring, 1994), 2-8. Available on www : www.georgetown.edu/tamlit/essays/colonial.html
• “Political Poetics: Annis Boudinot Stockton and Middle Atlantic Women's Culture,” New Jersey History 111 (Spring/Summer 1993), 66-110. Awarded 1995 Richard P. McCormick Prize in History by the New Jersey Historical Commission for best essay published on New Jersey history in the years 1993-94.
• “What Is the Early American Canon, and Who Said It Needed Expanding?” Resources for American Literary Study 19 (1993), 165-73.
• “Seated amid the Rainbow: On Teaching American Writings to 1800,” American Literature 65 (1993), 342-48.
• “ Caritas and Capital: Franklin's Narrative of the Late Massacres .” In Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective . Ed. J. A. Leo Lemay. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993. Pages 347-58.
• “Annis Boudinot Stockton and Benjamin Young Prime: A Poetical Correspondence, and More,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 52 (1991), 231-66.
• “Re-presenting Early American Drama,” Resources for American Literary Study 17 (1990), 1-24.
• “Loyal Verses, Tory Curses of the American Revolution,” New Jersey History 106 (Spring / Summer 1988), 87-99.
• “Radicalism in Joel Barlow's The Conspiracy of Kings (1792).” In Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge . Ed. J. A. Leo Lemay. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987. Pages 137-57.
• “Booth's Progress and the Resolution of Amelia ,” Studies in the Novel 16 (Spring 1984), 20-31.
• “Fitzgerald, Perkins, and The Great Gatsby ,” Journal of Narrative Technique 12 (Fall 1982), 210-20.
• “ An American Tragedy ; Or, the Tragedy of the Adamic Myth,” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 14 (Spring 1981), 9-15.
• “Fitzgerald's Revision of The Great Gatsby : The Creation of a Textual Anomaly,” American Notes and Queries 19 (October 1980), 21-24.
• “John Leacock's A New Song, On the Repeal of the Stamp-Act ,” Early American Literature 15 (1980), 188-93.

 

Articles in Reference Books

• American National Biography. Gen. Ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. “Joel Barlow,” 2: 166-68. “John Leacock,” 13: 323-24. “Annis Boudinot Stockton,” 20: 806-08.
• The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States . Ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. “Early National Writing, 1776-1820,” 264-67. “Annis Boudinot Stockton,” 852-53.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 37, American Writers of the Early Republic . Ed. Emory Elliott. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. “Richard Alsop,” 9-12. “Mason Fitch Cogswell,” 98-99.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 31, American Colonial Writers, 1735-1781 . Ed. Emory Elliott. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984. “John Leacock,” 149-51.

 

Media Interviews

Oregon Public Broadcasting's American Passages series, designed for classroom use. Commentator on video, “The Spirit of Nationalism.” Available January 2003 for purchase and available at http://www.learner.org/amerpass/

 

Recent Book Reviews

• Eric Stockdale, ‘Tis Treason, My Good Man!: Four Revolutionary Presidents and a Piccadilly Bookshop , in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America [forthcoming]
• Lestser C. Olson, Benjamin Franklin's Vision of American Community: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology , in The American Historical Review 111 (2006), 157-58.
• Etsuko Taketani, U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825-1861 , in Journal of the Early Republic 25 (2005), 516-18.
• Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders, in Early American Literature 39 (2004), 393-99.
• Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution, in The New England Quarterly 75 (2002), 157-60.
• Nian-Sheng Huang, Franklin's Father Josiah: Life of a Colonial Boston Tallow Chandler, 1657-1745, in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 125 (2001), 405-08.
• David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters , in American Literature 70 (1998), 397-98.

 

Work in Progress

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire . A revisionist study of Franklin's attitudes about colonialism and mercantilism, the book examines Franklin's writings on trade, populations, empire, and race in the context of early modern liberalism and European writings about empire and culture. [projected manuscript length, 400 pp.]

Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin. A collection of essays designed for undergraduate and graduate students and interested general readers. Cambridge University Press. [under contract]

 

Honors, Grants, and Awards

Scholarly Honors

• DLB Editor's Award for best-edited DLB volume of 1998, American Women Prose Writers to 1820.
• Richard J. McCormick Prize in History , 1995: Received from the New Jersey Historical Commission, for essay published in New Jersey History , “Political Poetics: Annis Boudinot Stockton and Middle Atlantic Women's Culture.”
• Cincinnati History Prize, 1991: Received from the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey for “distinguished achievement in advancing the knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of American history,” in recognition of achievement in public history and scholarship for Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton.

 

Fellowships

• American Council of Learned Societies : Release time fellowship award to complete book manuscript, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire , 2006-2007
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Library Company of Philadelphia: Archival research fellowship award, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire , winter 2000-2001
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, American Philosophical Society: Archival research fellowship award, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire , winter 2000-2001
• Research and Graduate Studies Office, College of Liberal Arts, Penn State: Release time award (one course release) for study of Benjamin Franklin and imperial Europe, fall 1998
• NEH Summer Stipend: Archival research award for work on Benjamin Franklin and Native Americans, summer 1992 (essays published, 1995, 1996, 1999)
• Melvin and Rosalind Jacobs Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities, College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State: Release time and archival research fellowship award for work on Benjamin Franklin and Native Americans, summer 1992 (essays published, 1995, 1996, 1999)
• Roy C. Buck Fund Award, College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State: Travel award to conduct research at Newberry Library for work on Benjamin Franklin and Native Americans, summer 1992 (essays published, 1995, 1996, 1999)
• American Council of Learned Societies : Release time fellowship award for transcriptions and archival research toward multi-volume edition of Joel Barlow's letters, 1987
• New Jersey Historical Commission: For research for Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton , 1986 (book published, 1995)
• New Jersey Committee for the Humanities: For research on Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton , 1986 (book published, 1995)
• Villanova University Faculty Summer Research Grant: For research and writing of “Radicalism in Joel Barlow's Conspiracy of Kings (1792),” 1985 (essay published 1987)
• University of Delaware Graduate Fellowships: Academic fellowships covering two academic years of graduate coursework, 1980-82

 

Teaching Awards and Fellowships

College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Teaching Award , 2005: Received in recognition of teaching innovation and excellence

Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning, Penn State: Release time for preparation and implementation of experimental research seminar, an English Department Senior Seminar team-taught with graduate student and undergraduate intern, titled “Colonial Encounters, Columbian Consequences,” spring 1998, spring 1999

 

Links to Selected Articles

“Recovering the Colonial, Beginning Again: On Teaching American Writings to 1800,” Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter , No. 11 (Spring, 1994), 2-8. Available on www : www.georgetown.edu/tamlit/essays/colonial.html

Forum in Teaching Early American Writings, Introduction: “The Uses of the Spanish Imperial Past in the Early ‘American' Classroom,” Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter , No. 12 (Fall,1994), 1-2. Available on www : www.georgetown.edu/tamlit/essays/forum_intro.html

 

Course Descriptions

English 403: Literature and Culture

Fictions, Fashions, and National Passions: Figuring National Identity in the Early American Republic

This course on novel-writing, novel-reading, and cultural consumption in the era of the early republic (roughly from the 1780s through the 1830s) will ask that students consider the relative social and political instability of the era against the methods used in the cultural marketplace to stabilize and promote the formation of a putatively national identity. By looking into the novels written and read, by examining attitudes being formulated about the colonial past and the post-Revolutionary War present, by assessing concerns about Native peoples and immigration, and by considering the emergent discourse on the gendering of activities, students will gain better insight into the difficulties faced by those who were attempting to live in, while formulating and defining, a “national” culture. In addition to several popular novels from the era, readings will include fiction in serials (newspapers and magazines) and pamphlets. Classroom format will be part lecture and part discussion. Lectures will occur, of course, as needed, but students will be expected to engage in high-quality participation each class meeting. Course requirements for final grade assessment: classroom (possibly group) presentations, in addition to regular class participation; impromptu writing assignments as necessary; and two papers on a topic of the student's choice or from a list of choices provided.

English 231: American Literature to 1865

A Literature Survey Course

Students will examine the many voices that inform American writings roughly to the era of the Civil War, from the era of colonial contact in the Americas to Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself.” While investigating the cultural issues relevant to the production of key literary texts, students will consider the extent to which there are many American literatures from which America's story of a “national literature” has emerged. One of the goals of the course will be to enable students to understand the traditions that have dominated English American letters even as they also come to terms with the extent to which the writings of what we now call the United States were, in effect, from many cultures, from the very beginning. Writing assignments include one semester research paper (up to ten pages total), an interim report on that paper, plus three shorter tests of reading taken during the course of the semester.

English 402: Literature and Society

Race/Writing/Nation: Eighteenth-Century English America and the Formation of an “American” National Identity

Taking into account a range of primary works related to issues in “race” and “nationhood,” community and alienation, literacy and liberty, religion and “enlightenment,” our goal will be to examine literary and cultural tensions in the English colonies and the new United States. We'll read writings that formally and informally address several related concepts having to do with nation-formation and national identity. Writings by European settlers, by Africans and African-descended people, and by Native Americans are among those covered in readings. We'll look into two concurrent issues relevant to such study: 1) the strong interest in theories of race, gender, and sensibility, evoked as sentimentalism in the writings, and 2) the ways in which developing capital enabled a flourishing print culture to formulate “enlightened” roles for “good” subject-citizens. And we'll consider, finally, whether “enlightenment” led to a discourse of “nation” that by intent and purpose worked to exclude most people in the U.S. cultural fabric. Classroom format will be part lecture and part discussion. Lectures will occur, of course, as needed, but students will be expected to engage in high-quality participation each class meeting. Assignments: Course requirements include: a classroom (possibly group) presentation about some issue central to the materials we're discussing, in addition to regular class participation; impromptu in-class or homework assignments as deemed necessary for continued high-quality work in class; and two out-of-class essays of five to seven pages in length, based in questions about the readings and issues covered in class. Attendance is taken each class, and regular attendance is a requirement.

English 487W: Senior Seminar

Colonial Encounters, Columbian Consequences

A Team-Taught Course Sponsored by the Schreyer Institute Designed as a research seminar, this senior seminar will afford you an opportunity to do extensive reading about the era of European colonialism in North America. By looking at the writings that have come down to us historically, we can begin to examine for ourselves the multiple meanings of words like “colonialism,” “empire,” and “frontier” as those meanings emerged and changed over time and in different regions. Indeed, we'll pay particular attention in the course to the various kinds of frontiers--political, cultural, military, and ethnic--that resulted from interactions among Native peoples and Europeans in North America. Writings emanating from the key European powers engaged in colonialism--that is, writings related to Spanish, French, and English America--will form our primary focus, although we are hoping to explore as well the very interesting materials that arose from contact and settlement by Swedes, Dutch, Germans, and other ethnic populations. Depending on the nature of the projects students in the course select, we will examine materials ranging from the “high” literature (poetry and drama) of the early modern era through oral cultural performances and “folk” dramas, from narratives (sometimes fictional) of encounter and captivity to non-fictional narratives. We'll conclude the semester by examining late 1980s and/or early 1990s films representing European colonial contact with indigenous peoples. By using a comparative method in our examination of Europeans' exploratory voyages to and settlement in the Americas (roughly, the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries), we can see the differences and similarities in Europeans' written discourse about their colonial experiences. By then considering anthology and film representation of the early era in our own day, we can begin to assess how the construction of what we call “history” and the writing of history is and probably always has been an interpretive and, indeed, creative process. We'll gain a double perspective, then: the scholarly perspective of the ways in which contact between peoples was figured at the time for European readers and the critical, present-day cultural perspective of the ways in which the contact era has been described for U.S. citizens. This is a research seminar. It will require your doing resource work in the library, and the assignments are designed so as to engage you in both independent and cooperative, team-based projects (with colleagues in the class). You'll be making presentations of your research findings, too. Formal written assignments include your preparing: a book review of a scholarly book about the era; an “anthology” selection of a writer/text of your choosing; a cooperatively written introductory headnote to the anthology selections of the colleagues on your team; and a brief, final (take-home) essay for the course.

Courses offered under American Studies 402W: American Themes and Eras

Exiled in the Land of the Free: Native Nations and U.S. Indian Policy, 1790-1990

This course will examine, in the context of discussion about U.S. imperialist culture, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century materials related to the era of nation-formation, writings taking up issues from the perspective of both Native peoples and white settlers. By examining the historical circumstances of people in the United States during the time of greatest settlements by non-Indians in the West, we'll consider the complicated ways in which federal imperialism was formulated and implemented and the resilient ways in which Native peoples' adaptation and/or resistance to “American” imperialism was expressed. Given the emphasis of the course on both literary and cultural history and legal debates, students of American literature and American studies, comparative literature, history, political science, international politics and diplomacy, and education will likely find material of relevance to their fields and interests. Course requirements for final grade assessment include two classroom (possibly group) presentations, in addition to regular class participation; impromptu writing assignments as necessary; and one semester-long research project on a topic related to the student's interest in materials under discussion (this is a paper of 12-15 pages).

“Exiled in the Land of the Free: Native Nations and U.S. Indian Policy from 1790”

Taking its primary title from a collection of essays on democracy, Native American nations, and the U.S. Constitution, this course will examine, in the context of discussion about U.S. imperialist culture, writings by both settlers and Native peoples. By examining the historical circumstances of people in the United States during the time of greatest settlements by non-Indians in the West, we'll consider the complicated ways in which federal imperialism was implemented and the resilient ways in which Native peoples' adaptation and/or resistance to “American” imperialism has been expressed across time. We will consider the earliest treaty situations in the context of European and British American imperialism, but we will quickly move on to explore the range of responses, across regions, to settlements by non-indigenous people. Perhaps by the end of the semester, we'll come to a fuller understanding of issues related to Native American sovereignty. Given the emphasis of the course on both literary/cultural history and legal debates, students of American literature and American studies, comparative literature, history, political science, international politics and diplomacy, and education will likely find material of relevance to their fields and interests. Course requirements for final grade assessment: two classroom (possibly group) presentations, in addition to regular class participation; impromptu writing assignments as necessary; and one semester-long research project (a long paper, turned in in two versions).

“Fictions, Fashions, and National Passions”

This course on novel-reading, novel-writing, and cultural consumption in the era of the early republic (the early nineteenth century) will enable us to consider the relative social and political instability of the new United States as it sought to create for itself and its peoples a new political identity. By looking into novels written and read, by examining attitudes being formulated about the colonial past and the post-Revolutionary War present, by assessing concerns about Native peoples and immigration, and by considering emergent attitudes about separate spheres for women and men, we are aiming to gain better insight into difficulties faced by those who were attempting to live in, while formulating and defining, a “national” culture. Requirements : regular class participation and the preparation of “talking points” for class; impromptu in-class or homework assignments as deemed necessary for continued high-quality work in class; and two out-of-class essays of five to seven pages in length, based in questions about the readings and/or issues covered in class. We'll be reading Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay); The Power of Sympathy (William Hill Brown); The Coquette (Hannah W. Foster); Charlotte Temple ( Susanna Rowson); Wieland, and Memoirs of Carwin ( Charles Brockden Brown); The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper); Hobomok and Other Writings (Lydia Maria Child); Hope Leslie (Catherine Maria Sedgwick); The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne); and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave ( Frederick Douglass).

History 440: Colonial History to 1753

Colonial History Survey Course

Students in this course will examine the European contest for empire in North America, paying particular attention to the multiple sets of frontiers--political, cultural, military, and ethnic--that resulted from encounters between Native peoples and peoples of differing European backgrounds. Although the key European powers under scrutiny will be those of Spain, France, and England, students will be encouraged to explore materials related to settlements by Germans, Dutch, Swedes, and other ethnic populations. Students will also be asked to consider Native influences upon colonial processes. The semester will conclude with an examination of a few late 1980s and early 1990s films (general media films, not documentaries) about European colonial contact with indigenous peoples. Written work, in addition to common class readings, will center largely around the student's independently selected course project related to one particular text or issue in colonialism. Written assignments include: a summary of a book chapter or article; a brief annotated bibliography on materials related to the course project; and two papers. The first paper will be one of definition. The second paper, a paper of critical cultural or textual analysis, will be evaluated in two parts (first as a draft and then as a final project). Quizzes on readings will occur as necessary. Course prerequisites for undergraduates: History 20 and one other History course.

Courses offered under English 554: Studies in Early American Literature:

“A Survey of American Literature to the 1800”

A good, old-fashioned survey of American literature to 1800. Students will examine early British American writings in the context of writings by other Europeans, by African Americans, and by Native Americans. The primary text will be the Early American Writings , along with three novels (H.W. Foster's The Coquette , C.B. Brown's Edgar Huntly and Wieland ). Our goal will be to grapple with the primary readings while also addressing the historiographical questions that arise when studying colonialism, then or now. Students will be encouraged (but not required) to explore the variety of critical methodologies that might be used in analysis of these texts. Assignments include a shorter paper (on a topic or text of the student's choice and directed to the question of how to teach that topic or text), a summary of research in the student's chosen area of inquiry (in the form of a brief, annotated bibliography), and syllabus presented to the class.

“Colonialism and Discontent: Studies in Comparative Colonialisms”

With readings by settler populations and Native Americans, students will survey the discourses of empire and Native American relations from the colonialist beginnings to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. By examining works such as Columbus's diaries, Shakespeare's Tempest , Villagra's History of New Mexico , Williams's Key into the Language of America , Behn's Oroonoko , Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality , Franklin's writings on Native Americans, and a group of additional writings by Europeans and European settlers in the Americas dating from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, students will consider the ideological premises and rhetorical strategies of imperialist discourse. Students will examine, side-by-side with Europeans' writings, the few available works of the era by Native Americans, from the earliest chants about the arrival of the Europeans to some eighteenth-century autobiographical narrations and sermons to the counter-colonial statements by William Apes (Pequot), Elias Boudinot (Cherokee), and Chief Seattle (Suquamish). The course will conclude with study of Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824) and Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827). Although the classroom methodology and suggested secondary reading will involve culture theory and cultural criticism, students will be encouraged to bring a variety of critical approaches to these texts. Assignments: one book review, one short paper (with classroom presentation of it), one long paper (revision of short paper is encouraged).

“Enlightenment Discourses, Imperial Enchantments”

Students in this course will examine eighteenth-century Enlightenment culture, considering the ways in which the invention of “enlightenment” discourse both assisted and contradicted English, Spanish, and French imperialism. Treating Enlightenment in its transnational dimension, we will look at a range of texts, some of them by Europeans in Europe but most of them by writers from New Spain and New France as well as the English colonies. The constellation of issues involved in imperialism include the study of race, class, and gender issues, so we will be looking at writers who might have been thought “outside” the dominant discourse of Enlightenment along with those whose works centered Enlightenment culture. Genres will include fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. While we might engage some theoretical perspectives (among theorists, Habermas, Foucault, Horkheimer and Adorno), most of the work for the course will be conducted along a text-based, cultural studies model which will employ both close textual reading and much contextualization of the works in material culture. Authors to be studied will include: Wheatley, Jefferson, Occom, Franklin, Haynes, Crevecoeur, Murray, Paine, Barlow, Rowson, Tanner, Hall, Brown, Diego de Vargas, Palou, Rousseau, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Equiano. Writing assignments: one book review, one short paper (and brief class presentation of it), and one long paper (the shorter paper is usually a draft of the longer one on the same topic).

“Race/Writing/Nation: Imagining Community in Eighteenth-Century British America”

Taking into account a range of primary works related to issues in “race” and “nationhood,” community and alienation, literacy and liberty, religion and “enlightenment,” our goal will be to examine literary and cultural tensions in the British colonies and the new United States. We'll read writings that formally and informally address several related concepts having to do with nation-formation and national identity. Writings by European settlers, by Africans and African-descended people, and by Native Americans are among those covered during the course of the semester. We'll look into two concurrent issues relevant to such study: 1) the strong interest in theories of race, gender, and sensibility, evoked as sentimentalism in the writings, and 2) the ways in which developing capital enabled a flourishing print culture to formulate “enlightened” roles for “good” subject-citizens. Classroom format is largely de-centered: lectures will occur, of course, as needed, but students will be expected to engage in high-quality participation on a weekly basis. Assignments include a class report (with handout) on a selected topic (employing secondary scholarship), a book review of a scholarly book in this field, and a seminar paper (turned in in two versions, a first paper and a second paper).

“ Virtue's Commerce”

By examining a number of what might be called foundational readings in early modern liberalism, we will consider how different conceptions of virtue entered the print and cultural marketplace in British North America during the eighteenth century. To grasp some initial points about early modern liberalism and its impact upon culture, we'll examine writings by Milton, Locke, and some of the central theorists of what has come to be called the commonwealth tradition. We collaborate to cover readings central to the question of “liberalism” in the early modern era in Britain, including primary writings by Mandeville, Hobbes, Milton, Locke, Hume, Burke, Shaftesbury, and Smith. We'll move from examining the social, cultural, and economic theory of the era to its implementation in the non-fiction and fiction of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. We'll then shift to examining writings from British North America, where liberal ideologies (and the critique of liberal ideologies) took different shape in the writings of some key colonial American theorists of liberalism and the virtuous citizenry. For the second half of the semester, we'll look at how writers found a reading market in eighteenth-century British North America by focusing on the various meanings of virtue in circulation in fiction and non-fiction. Here, we'll examine writings by Franklin, W.H. Brown, Foster, C.B. Brown. For students interested in poetry, presumed in the era to be “the highest form of art,” alternative readings in Pope, Swift, Grainger, Wheatley, Stockton, and Barlow will be recommended. In addition to high-quality class participation, assignments include a team analysis and report on a theorist of economy, print culture, and society (the first seven writers mentioned above), and a seminar paper created in two versions, a draft presented to class, and a final version prepared as a scholarly analysis in the field. By way of introducing students to scholarly writing in the field, we'll examine some of the seminar papers from former 554 students (most of whom did not specialize in this field) that have been published in several different places.

English 602: Supervised Experience in College Teaching

“Teaching Literature to Undergraduates”

English 602 for teachers of literature is designed to assist teachers of literature and culture primarily in the English and Comparative Literature Departments. Developed to enhance teaching confidence and teaching quality, the course includes components related to: developing appropriate personal teaching goals and strategies; creating syllabi; creating assignments; assessing student performance in class and in written work; using technological support in the classroom; and developing and writing one's own philosophy of teaching. Concerns of the course are both pragmatic and philosophical, and they encompass additional professional issues (the job hunt, academic advising, etc.) as these might arise from student interest and expertise.