American literature and culture

Our work in this area underpins the Department’s longstanding reputation for interdisciplinary research and the study of literary and cultural history.

We have particular strengths in transatlantic literature and culture between 1700 and 1900; American magazines and periodicals; contemporary US and Canadian literature; and contemporary North American visual and material cultures.

Research impact

Storying Invisible Disability: Reading and Representing Autism

Led by Dr Ruth Maxey and Dr Robin Vandome. This AHRC Impact Accelerator Award-funded project is a collaboration with the UK charity The Reader, an organisation that empowers a diverse range of people through shared reading. The Storying Invisible Disability project is supporting The Reader to reach new audiences by informing its use of texts for community Shared Reading groups, providing new resources for training future ‘Reader Leaders,’ and the establishment of a new autism-themed Shared Reading Group in Nottingham. Spanning Literary Studies, American Studies, the Health Humanities, and Disability Studies, the Storying Invisible Disability project is engaged with urgent issues of public health and disability and the need to create a more just and equitable world.

Mapping the Indigenous North American Collection with Nottingham City Museums and Galleries

Led by Dr Stephanie Lewthwaite and Dr Matthew Pethers, Professor Vivien Miller and Professor Gillian Roberts. This AHRC Impact Accelerator Award-funded project supports Nottingham City Museums and Galleries with the decolonisation of its World Cultures collections by working on the identification and provenance of material in the under-researched Indigenous North American collection.

Devised in collaboration with Indigenous Studies experts and museum curators, the project researches the colonial histories shaping the Indigenous North American collection and the ethical implications of curating Indigenous material cultures. By building a digital archive of the collection and new research and practitioner networks in the field, the project aims to enhance the collection’s visibility, accessibility and wider use in and beyond Nottingham.

Research activities

Graham Thompson appeared on BBC Radio’s In Our Time discussing Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).

Ruth Maxey organised and led a two-day programme of public events, "The Art of Short Form Narrative: Creative Writing and Ethnic Identity" in May 2024 in conjunction with Nottingham City of Literature and Nottingham Central Library and was interviewed about the programme on Notts TV.

Matthew Pethers recorded an episode of the Early American Literature Podcast based on his co-edited special journal issue, Early American Fictionality.

Stephanie Lewthwaite recorded an episode of the Borders Talk Podcast on Reading and Re-reading Gloria Anzaldúa.

Matthew Pethers co-organised the conference, “Crime, Justice, and Cultures of Transgression in Early America: The 14th Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society,” featuring papers on multiple aspects of the expression and representation of law-making and law-breaking in North American literary, cultural, and intellectual life between 1691 and 1830 with panel sessions on early American captivity narratives, piracy, urban policing, intersections between science and race, the global circuits of enslavement, indentured servitude, and financial crime.

Recent publications

Matthew Pethers and Daniel Diez Couch, eds., The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art (Bucknell University Press, 2024)
Graham Thompson, “A Manual Job in a Machine Age: The Long Wait for Mechanical Typesetting,” Book History 27, no. 2 (2024): 309–45.
Stephanie Lewthwaite, “Relational Ecologies in Contemporary Chicana Border Art,” in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands, eds. Zalfa Feghali and Deborah Toner (Routledge, 2024)
Matthew Pethers, “William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969),” American Literary History 36, no. 1 (2024): 16-50.
Ruth Maxey, "Animals in the Writing of Bharati Mukherjee" ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 54, no. 1, (2023): 55-71.
Graham Thompson, “Melville and Periodical Culture,” in Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge (ed.), A Companion to Herman Melville (John Wiley & Sons, 2022), 261–271.
Ruth Maxey, "The Legacy of Gilman’s Wallpaper in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘A Temporary Matter’" Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 20, no. 1 (2023): 79-94.
Ruth Maxey, ed., The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee (Temple University Press, 2023) with an introduction, "Positioning Bharati Mukherjee's Short Stories," xiii-xxix.
Graham Thompson, “Transnationalism and the Literary Magazine,” in Tim Lanzendörfer (ed.), The Routledge Companion to the Literary Magazine (New York: Routledge, 2022), 36–44.
Ruth Maxey, “‘Indiascape’: Bharati Mukherjee’s engagement with E.M. Forster, Hermann Hesse and R.K. Narayan” Postcolonial Text 17, no. 4 (2022).
Anthony Hutchinson, “Cultivating the Classical Style: The Stanford-Denver Creative Writing Axis,” Modern Fiction Studies 66, no. 3 (2020): 474-98.
Susan Billingham, “Performed Ethnography: The Pedagogical Potential of Research-Informed Theatre,” London Journal of Canadian Studies 34 (2019): 201-26.