I teach in the Department of English, the Program in History & Literature, and the Committee on Degrees in American Studies. I also supervise the Twentieth Century & Contemporary Colloquium and co-direct a seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center.
My scholarship resides at the intersection of literary studies, sociological theory, and design thinking. Essays of mine appear in ELH, New Literary History, Post45, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, The Henry James Review, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
My 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 have just completed, with designer Peter Mendelsund, The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature (Ten Speed Press/Crown Press/Penguin Random House, 2020). A collaborative project that synthesizes literary analysis and design, The Look of the Book draws on in-depth interviews, archival research, and recent scholarship in media studies to provide a comprehensive exploration of the meaning, history, value, mechanics, and future of the book cover.
This year I am beginning a new book project provisionally titled The School of James: a study of William James as teacher and mentor to a remarkable array of students, who helped shape the intellectual, literary, and visual cultures of the modern world.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where I was a dissertation fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities and a member of the Object Cultures Project. My scholarship has been 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
