As John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, I teach in the Department of English and in the Program in History & Literature at Harvard, where I also serve on the Committee on Degrees in American Studies. In addition, I supervise the American Literature Colloquium and co-chair "Novel Theory Across the Disciplines," a seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center.
My scholarship and teaching focus on modern and contemporary American literature, the history and theory of the novel, visual media, and methods of interpretation. Recent essays appear in ELH, New Literary History, Post45, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, The Henry James Review, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
My first book, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form, is available from Princeton University Press. Site Reading received the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction from the Media Ecology Association.
I am currently at work on two book projects: Art Novels: Fiction, Digital Media, and the Production of the Present (under contract with Princeton University Press) and, with designer Peter Mendelsund, The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature (under contract with Ten Speed Press / Crown / Penguin Random House). Additional details about these projects can be found here. A sample essay from The Look of the Book is available here.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where I was an Affiliated Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities and a member of the Object Cultures Project. My scholarship has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Huntington Library.
I can be reached at: alworth@fas.harvard.edu
