William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture
A. B., American History and Literature, Harvard College.
Ph. D. History of American Civilization, Harvard University.
Bio
I have written widely in American literature and culture, including, for example, two books on nineteenth-century music history; the bicentennial history of the American Antiquarian Society; two books on American Transcendentalism; two in American religious history; a history of the nineteenth-century American novel; and a biography of a Native American. I advise students in all of these areas.
To read more, visit my websitePublications:
- A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).
- America’s Instrument: The Banjo in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
- Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005).
- American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007).
- Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013).
- Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).
Teaching Awards
- University Post-Baccalaureate Distinguished Teaching Award, University of North Carolina, 2004.
Awards
- Norman Foerster Prize in American Literature, awarded by the Modern Language Association, 1977.
- Senior Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, 1985-86.
- Frances Densmore Prize, awarded by American Musical Instrument Society, 1996.
- University Teaching Award in Post-Baccalaureate Education, 2003.
- Distinguished Scholar Award, Division of American Literature to 1800 of the Modern Language Association, 2008.
- National Book Critics Award in Non-Fiction, finalist, 2008.
- Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence, American Antiquarian Society (2006-07).
Courses Taught:
- English 219: The American Novel.
- English 220: Survey of American Literature to 1900.
- Studies in 19th-Century American Literature (graduate).