Please use the Department links below to find a specific member of staff in Cultures, Languages and Area Studies.
Graham Thompson
Professor of American Literature, Faculty of Arts
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Teaching Summary
During 2023-24 I'm teaching two first-year courses on American Literature and Culture before and after 1940. I also teach a second-year course on business in American culture.
I'm currently supervising PhDs on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Californian fiction and American literature and the corporation.
I've supervised well over a dozen PhDs to completion on topics including digital literature; American women's prison zines; racial liminality in nineteenth-century American literature; John Cheever's magazine fiction; post-apocalyptic fiction; the segregated town in white Southern fiction; Ralph Waldo Emerson; the "quiet" novel in contemporary American literature; Cormac McCarthy; post-suburban American literature; the nineteenth-century American short story; transnationalism in the work of Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand; and contemporary New York and Shanghai fiction.
I have also supervised several MRes theses on subjects ranging from the sea fiction of James Fenimore Cooper to Rolling Stone magazine, the short fiction of Richard Ford, and Donna Tartt.
Research Summary
My main area of research is nineteenth-century American literature and print culture. My latest book is Herman Melville: Among the Magazines. It focuses on the writing Melville published in Putnam's… read more
Current Research
My main area of research is nineteenth-century American literature and print culture. My latest book is Herman Melville: Among the Magazines. It focuses on the writing Melville published in Putnam's and Harper's magazines and is the first book to ask what it means to think about this work as magazine writing rather than short fiction. The book presses Melville back into the magazine publishing world of the 1850s and draws on print culture history, biography, and literary criticism to examine Melville's relationships with forgotten materials, editors, writers, and literary traditions.
I am currently working on a provisionally titled Making American Literature, which will be a media history of nineteenth-century American literature.
Future Research
Nineteenth-century print production and distribution.
American magazines in the nineteenth century.
History of the nineteenth-century short story.