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Anthony Hutchison
Assistant Professor in American Intellectual and Cultural History, Faculty of Arts
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Teaching Summary
I have taught core and optional modules in US literature, history, thought and culture. This teaching has mostly been text-based with primary works studied ranging from seventeenth century Puritan… read more
Research Summary
I am currently working on a critical-biographical study of the American writer John Williams. This has been supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.
Recent Publications
HUTCHISON, A., 2017. Character and Charismatic Authority in Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men and Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah. In: MARTIN GRIFFIN and CHRISTOPHER HEBERT, eds., Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience University of Tennessee Press. 149-166
HUTCHISON, A., 2013. Cold War Humanism and Beyond: Postmodern Subjectivity and Humanist Literary Critique in Rorty and Eggers. In: ROBERTO CANTÚ, ed., An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Modernity, Critique and Humanism Cambridge Scholars Press. (In Press.)
I have taught core and optional modules in US literature, history, thought and culture. This teaching has mostly been text-based with primary works studied ranging from seventeenth century Puritan sermons to twenty-first century manifestos related to digital culture. I have also taught at postgraduate level for a number of years in similar areas.
The doctoral theses I have so far supervised to completion in many ways reflect the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of my teaching and research interests. They have covered topics such as the philosophies of Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell; the twentieth century African-American literary canon; the fiction of suburbia and post-suburbia; the culture of the American Left and Latin America in the 1980s; and the 60s protest memoir.
At present I am supervising work that explores masculinity and mid-twentieth century nuclear shelter culture as well as a comparative study of the "third way" approach to welfare policy that was a feature of the New Democrats under Bill Clinton and New Labour in the Blair-Brown years,
Past Research
My previous research was a study of American political fiction. It involved studies of several major works by Gore Vidal, Lionel Trilling, Russell Banks and Philip Roth. I have written on American music and have also recently completed work on some contemporary American fiction by George Saunders and Dave Eggers as well as a piece on the concept of "charisma" in US political fiction. I have also published on the status and treatment of Abraham Lincoln within US intellectual history. I would welcome the opportunity to supervise postgraduate students on any of these or related topics.
Future Research
In the longer term I have an interest in pursuing research on post WWII Anglo-American thought and literary culture. I am particularly interested in race-class tensions and how these were understood and negotiated by liberal intellectuals (writers, artists, commentators).
HUTCHISON, A., 2017. Character and Charismatic Authority in Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men and Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah. In: MARTIN GRIFFIN and CHRISTOPHER HEBERT, eds., Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience University of Tennessee Press. 149-166
HUTCHISON, A., 2013. Cold War Humanism and Beyond: Postmodern Subjectivity and Humanist Literary Critique in Rorty and Eggers. In: ROBERTO CANTÚ, ed., An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Modernity, Critique and Humanism Cambridge Scholars Press. (In Press.)
HUTCHISON, A., 2013. Immaterial world: precarity and post-industrial labor in
George Saunders’s “Sea Oak” and Dave Eggers��s A Hologram for the King C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings. 2(1), 3-20
HUTCHISON, A., 2010. "Following the ghost": the psychogeography of alternative country. In: BLANCO, M.D.P. and PEEREN, E., eds., Popular ghosts: the haunted spaces of everyday culture Continuum. 268-281
HUTCHISON, A., 2007. Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction New York: Columbia University Press.
HUTCHISON, A., 2005. 'Purity is Petrefaction': Liberalism and Betrayal in Philip Roth’s I Married A Communist” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. 9(2-3), 315-327