former students:
Sarah Wagner-McCoy, PhD 2011, assistant professor of English and Humanities at Reed College
fields: 19th- and 20th-century US fiction; trans-Atlanticism; Irish literature; literature and the environment
dissertation title: "Trans-Atlantic Pastoral and the Realist Novel"
dissertation committee: Lawrence Buell (chair), Amanda Claybaugh, Leah Price, Werner Sollors
publications: "Virginilian Chesnutt: Southern Ecologues and Northern Georgics in the Conjure Tales," ELH (spring 2013).
Lesley Goodman, PhD 2013, assistant professor of English at Albright College
fields: 19th-century British literature; theories of reading; narrative theory
dissertation title: "Indignant Reading"
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh, Leah Price (chair), Elaine Scarry
publications: "Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author," Journal of Popular Culture (March 2015)
"Rebellious Identification, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Arabella," Narrative 18.2 (May 2010)
Liz Maynes-Aminzade, PhD 2013, digital strategist for Public Books
fields: Victorian literature; the novel and narrative theory; history of the book
dissertation title: "Macro-Realism: Social Complexity, Complicity, and Narrative Scope"
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh, Caroline Levine, Louis Menand, Leah Price (chair)
publications: "The Omnicompetent Narrator from George Eliot to Jonathan Franzen," Studies in the Novel 46:2 (Summer 2014)
"You're Part of Something Bigger: Macrorealist TV" RaVoN (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net) 63 (April 2013)
"Tiny DIY Books by Victorian Tweens," The Hairpin (27 September 2011)
"Literary Fetishes: The Bronte Miniature Books," Harvard Library Bulletin 23.3 (November 2012).
Margaret Hunt Gram, PhD 2013, manager of user experience at Medullan
fields: US literature and culture; African-American literature; the contemporary novel in English; queer theory
dissertation title: "Matters of State: American Literature in the Civil Rights Era"
dissertation committee: Lawrence Buell, Amanda Claybaugh, Louis Menand (chair), Werner Sollors
publications: "Freedom's Limits: Jonathan Franzen, the Realist Novel, and the Problem of Growth," American Literary History (2014)
"Chester Himes and the Capacities of State," Studies in American Fiction (Fall 2012)
"Listening to Books," N1BR (n+1 book review), 9 February 2012
Kaye Wierzbicki, PhD 2014, contract specialist for the General Services Administration
fields: 19th-century US literature; 20th-century US literature; landscape studies; eco-criticism
dissertation title: "Garden Work: The Horticultural Formation of American Literature, 1850-1930"
dissertation committee: Lawrence Buell, Amanda Claybaugh (chair), Elisa New
publications: "A Cup of Pennyroyal Tea," The Toast (27 May 2015)
"The Formal and the Foreign: Sarah Orne Jewett's Garden Fences and the Meaning of Enclosure," Nineteenth-Century Literature 69:1 (June 2014)
post on Wharton's garden writings for The Mount's blog, 9 October 2012
Heather Brink-Roby, PhD 2015, post-doc at Magdelane College, Cambridge University
fields: 19th-century British literature; history and philosophy of science
dissertation title: "The World in Small: Typological Thinking in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel"
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh, Philip Fisher, Leah Price (chair), Elaine Scarry
publications: "Psyche: Mirror and Interior in Vanity Fair," ELH (2013) 80.1
"Natural Representation: Diagram and Text in Darwin's On the Origin of Species," Victorian Studies 51 (2009): 247-73
"Siren canora: The Mermaid and the Mythical in Late Nineteenth-Century Science," Archives of Natural History 35 (2008): 1-14
Laura Forsberg, PhD 2015, NEH fellow at the Huntington Library
fields: Victorian poetry; Victorian prose
dissertation title: "The Miniature and Victorian Literature"
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh, Leah Price, Elaine Scarry (chair)
publications: "Multum in Parva: The Nineteenth-Century Miniature Book," Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 110.4 (December 2016)
"Nature's Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the Victorian Fairy," Victorian Studies 57:4 (2015)
"Christina Rossetti and Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight," SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 55:4 (2015)
"The Miniature World of Charlotte Bronte's Great Glass Town," in Charlotte Bronte from the Beginnings: New Essays from Juvenelia to the Major Works. Eds. Judith Pike and Lucy Morrison. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015.
David Weimer, PhD 2015, librarian for Cartographic Collections and Learning at the Harvard Map Collection
fields: 19th-century US literature; religion and literature
dissertation title: "Protestant Institutionalism: Religion, Literature, and Society after the State Church"
dissertation committee: Lawrence Buell, Amanda Claybaugh (chair), Elisa New
publication: "Notes on the Text: It's Not All Greek to Me: Inheriting Typos in Notes on the State of Virginia," forthcoming from Common-place
"Individual, Institution, and Society: Religion and Political Economy in Harriet Beecher Stowe," J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 4:2 (September 2016).
Ari Hoffman, PhD 2016, law student at Stanford University Law School
fields: 20th-century US literature and culture; contemporary US literature and culture; Israeli literature; Hebrew
dissertation title: "The Much Two Promised Lands: Israel, America, and the Quest for Jewish Authenticity"
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh, Ju Yon Kim, Elisa New (chair), Ruth Wisse
publications: "What Jewish-American Literature Needs to Do Next," forthcoming in Studies in Jewish American Literature
"My Favorite Anti-Semite: An American Jewish Reflection on Ty Cobb for Opening Day," Tablet (28 March 2014)
"The Covering Cherub in Blake's Prophetic Works," (honorable mention for the Emory Elliott Memorial Prize, 2010)
current students:
Nicholas Nardini, graduate student in English, writer for Scandal (ABC)
fields: 20th-century US literature
dissertation title: "The Planetary Mind: Postwar American Literature as Human Literature"
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh, Louis Menand (chair), Werner Sollors
publications: "A Fresh-Start Doctrine: The Marshall Plan, The Adventures of Augie March, and the Bildungsroman after Nationalism," Arizona Quarterly 71:2 (Summer 2015)
"Henry Reed's American Wordworth," Symbiosis 15.2.
Daniel Farbman, graduate student in American Civilization, Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School
fields: American literature; history of radicalism; legal pragmatism and jurisprudence
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh (chair), Ken Mack, John Stauffer, Werner Sollors
dissertation title: "Revolutionary Practice"
publications: "It is Not an Era of Repose": How the Legal System Personalizes Injustice and Sparks Protest, forthcoming in Law, Culture, and the Humanities
Rev. of Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature, forthcoming in Law, Culture, and the Humanities
Rev. of Hanoch Dagan, Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory, in Critical Analysis of Law 1: 2 (2014)
Janet Zong, graduate student in English
fields: 20th century and contemporary US literature and culture, transnational Anglophone literature, world literature
dissertation committee: Glenda Carpio, Amanda Claybaugh, Louis Menand, Martin Puchner
Andy Donnelly, graduate student in English
fields: 19th- and 20th-century US literature
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh, Louis Menand, and Robin Bernstein
publications: "Langston Hughes on the DL," forthcoming from College Literature
Emily Silk, graduate student in English
fields: 19th century US literature
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh (chair), Deidre Lynch, Leah Price
Eliza Holmes, graduate student in English
fields: 19th century British literature
dissertation committee: Amanda Claybaugh, Deidre Lynch, Elaine Scarry
Chris Schlegel, graduate student in English
fields: poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on the long 20th century in North America; creative writing; fiction of the present
dissertation committee: Steph Burt (chair), Amanda Claybaugh, Louis Menand, Helen Vendler
dissertation title: "The Orchard Will Bloom": Donald Justice and American Poetry, 1945-1980
publications: Honest James (New York: The Song Cave, 2015); poems in LANA TURNER, Company Journal, The Volta, and Petri Press (online)