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Expertise Summary
My research interests are in the literary, intellectual and cultural history of America between the early eighteenth century and the Civil War, and particularly: matters of form and aesthetics; book history and periodical culture; the origins of American Romanticism; ideas of labor and knowledge during the antebellum period; early American drama; transatlantic cultural relations.
Teaching Summary
I am currently and have recently supervised PhD students working on: Ralph Waldo Emerson; John Jay; American loyalism and emotions history; racial liminality in nineteenth-century American fiction;… read more
Research Summary
I am currently working on a book project entitled The Imagined Archive: Fragments, Forgeries, Fictionalities and the Rise of the American Historical Novel, 1740-1840.
This monograph offers the first comprehensive analysis of the genealogy of the American historical novel, tracing its origins to a substantial but so far overlooked body of writings that established many of this later genre's concerns and techniques. While standard accounts of the historical novel tend to posit it as emerging fully formed with the work of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper in the early nineteenth century, The Imagined Archive looks to a longer tradition of "forged fragments" as one that was attempting to fuse imaginative reconstruction and empirical detail much earlier. Unlike the much-discussed Romantic fragments of writers like Coleridge and the Schlegels, "forged fragments" were often carefully designed to resemble genuinely incomplete historical works and became particularly revealing focal points for wide-ranging debates about cultural authenticity, national memory, and literary identity during the late Enlightenment. Considering both the domestic creation and transatlantic importation of these forged fragments, which variously claimed to be from ancient Rome, pre-Christian Scotland, Biblical times, medieval Europe, or Indigenous cultures, my book recovers a largely forgotten corpus of historical fiction that both predates and complicates the conventional critical narratives around this genre.
Drawing on the overlapping, and increasingly contentious, engagement of theologians, classicists, ethnographers, archaeologists, and philosophers with the problem of the elusiveness of the past I examine how the generically flexible and epistemologically ambiguous form of the invented historical fragment raises a cluster of related questions about the development of historical fiction before the age of Scott and Cooper. What does the forged fragment tell us about the role of fictional reconstruction and imaginative inference in understanding ancient cultures during the Enlightenment? In what ways were forged fragments used to explore the unbreachable fissures between these ancient cultures and modern ideas, values, or events, and either celebrate or critique Enlightenment notions of progress? And in particular how did forged fragments capitalize on and compensate for a historiographical landscape in which archives were still patchy and embryonic and subjective antiquarian techniques had not yet given way to modern notions of scientific "objectivity"?
In taking American manifestations of the forged fragment for its corpus, The Imagined Archive considers a particularly fraught and revealing set of instances of this literary form's negotiation between different temporal and intellectual registers, given the pressing concern of writers in the colonies and early republic to find a "usable past" for their young civilization, their deep but conflicted cultural affinity with Anglo-European conceptions of classical and neoclassical "order," and the tensions inherent in the Revolution's advocacy of social equality in theory but not practice. Moreover, by focusing on the varied career of the invented historical fragment in America over the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century I chart cultural and geographical territory that has barely been explored before, offering: an alternative genealogy of the historical novel that radically revises the current Lukacsian paradigm; the first study of the idea and practice of literary forgery in early America; and a fresh account of the literary fragment that acknowledges both the distinctively pseudo-historical forms it took in the New World and the creative adaptations American writers wrought on the example of notorious fakers like James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton.
I also have a long-term research interest in the aesthetics and temporality of textual serialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Treating seriality as a diverse phenomenon incorporating magazine instalments, fascicule volumes, republished editions and unofficial sequels and abridgements, as well as a wide rage of genres, I have explored how various American writers used strategies of narrative extension and interruption to establish the heteroglossic scope, mimetic realism and affective investment central to the development of American literary culture, and continue to work on this topic. An essay called "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Writing and Reading Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States," which is drawn from this still-evolving project, can be found in New Directions in the History of the Novel, eds. Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson (Palgrave, 2014), and more recent work in this vein has appeared in Nineteenth Century Studies and The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine.
I am more generally interested in addressing the conceptualization, dissemination and contestation of "the novel" in colonial America in future work, drawing on both established transatlantic methodologies and emerging work on the idea of "fictionality" in order to make a case for the significant pre-history to our familiar narratives of the post-revolutionary "rise of the American novel." I have very briefly sketched out some of the parameters for this project in a contribution to a roundtable on "21st Century Studies in the Early American Novel" that I edited for the Journal of American Studies, and that also included pieces by Duncan Faherty, Thomas Koenigs, Karen Weyler, Ed White, Sian Silyn Roberts and Cathy N. Davidson. In addition, I have co-edited (with Thomas Koenigs) a special issue of Early American Literature - 56.3 (2021) - on the topic of fictionality that reflects some of the trends and approaches I am interested in developing here. A podcast for Early American Literature in which we discuss the conception and goals of this special issue can be found here: https://eal.uky.edu/podcast
Additionally, I have co-edited a collection of essays - The Part and the Whole in Early American Art, Literature and Print Culture - with Daniel Diez Couch which appeared with Bucknell University Press in April 2024, and I am currently working, with Hilary Emmett and Len von Morze, on editing Volume 2 of The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, which is contracted to appear from Bucknell University Press in 2024. More information on this volume and the Brown edition as a whole can be found here: http://brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/volumes.php
I would be keen to work with students on any subject relating to the literary, intellectual and cultural history of America between 1600 and 1900, and would also welcome inquiries from students more broadly interested in literary professionalism, periodical culture, the history of the book, American verse, aesthetic theory, transatlantic exchange, or the history of information systems.
Selected Publications
PETHERS, M., 2017. Transportation Narratives: Servants, Convicts, and the Literature of Colonization in British America. In: PAUL LAUTER and NICHOLAS COLES, eds., The History of American-Working Class Literature Cambridge University Press. 7-24
PETHERS, M., 2016. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth Century America. In: BERNIER, C. M., NEWMAN, J. and PETHERS, M., eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press. 136-51
PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. M. and NEWMAN, J., 2016. Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing. In: PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. M. and NEWMAN, J., eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press. 11-28
PETHERS, M., 2014. The Secret Witness: Thinking, and Not Thinking, About Servants in the Early American Novel. In: ANDREW LAWSON, ed., Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature Routledge. 40-55
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of American Literature in Transition: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1770-1828, eds. William Hunting Howell and Greta La Fleur. In American Literary History 36.2 (2024): 516-23.
Review of Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City by Betsy Klimasmith. In The Review of English Studies 73.312 (2022): 983-86
Review of Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Stefanie Schäfer. In American Literary History Online Review Series XXII (2022): 1536-39 https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajac170
Review of Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. In Early American Literature 54.1 (2019): 271-281.
Review of The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel by Joe Shapiro. In Studies in the Novel 50.4 (2018): 595-598
Review of Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America by Russ Castronovo. In The British Association for Romantic Studies Review 47 (2016): www.bars.ac.uk/review/index.php/barsreview/article/view/162/448
Review of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1859 by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. In Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 19.1 (2015): 109-113
Review of The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture by Jared Gardner. In Amerikastudien/American Studies 59.4 (2015): http://dgfa.de/wp-content/uploads/1_Pethers.pdf
Review of Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution by William B. Warner. In Literature and History 23.2 (2014): 92-94.
Review of Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World by Sam W. Haynes. In Journal of American Studies 46.4 (2012): E1-4.
Review of Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America by Wendy Bellion. In Journal of American Studies 46.3 (2012): 767-768.
Review of A History of the Book in America - Volume II: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley. In Journal of American Studies 46.2 (2012): E10-20.
Review of The Two Faces of American Freedom by Aziz Rana. In Journal of American Studies 45.3 (2011): E1-3.
Review of Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature by Paul Giles. In Journal of American Studies 43.2 (2009): 377-379.
Review of Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship by Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan. In The William and Mary Quarterly 65.3 (July 2008): 627-630.
SHORTER PUBLICATIONS
"The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization - Part 1." U. S. Studies Online (January 2016). http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/the-indentured-atlantic-bound-servitude-and-the-literature-of-american-colonization-part-one/
"The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization - Part 2." U.S. Studies Online (January 2016). http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/the-indentured-atlantic-bound-servitude-and-the-literature-of-american-colonization-part-two/
"The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization - Part 3." U.S. Studies Online (January 2016). http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/the-indentured-atlantic-bound-servitude-and-the-literature-of-american-colonization-part-three/
"Journalism." In The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, Volume 2, ed. Mark G. Spencer (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 592-99.
Introduction to "Online Roundtable: A History of the Book in America." In Journal of American Studies 46.2 (2012): E1-3.
"Thomas Cooper." In The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, Volume 1, ed. John R. Shook (New York: Continuum, 2012), 244-47.
SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS AND TALKS
March 2024: "Unexpected Endings: Social Crisis, Form, and the Antebellum Fragment," C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Pasadena.
March 2024: "Posthumous Fragments and the Editing of the Authorial Corpus in Early Nineteenth Century America," Unfolding Editorship Seminar, C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Pasadena.
March 2024: "Speaking in Ancient Tongues: Historical Conjecture and the Early American Fragment," Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865, Essen.
December 2023: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Contemporaneous Literary Fragments, and the Waste of Textual Overproduction." Refuse/Refusal: Fifth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Bristol.
June 2023: "When Was the First American Novel? Temporal Anachronism and the Long, Late Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1969)." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, University of Maryland.
March 2022: "When Was the First American Novel? Temporal Anachronism and the Long, Late Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1969)." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Miami.
February 2022 (invited): "Nobody's Talkin' At Me: Fictionality and the Servant's Voice in Early American Literature." Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865, JFK Institute, Berlin.
October 2021: "A Recipe for Disaster: Social Crisis, Form, and the Early American Fragment." Past Futures: Thinking in Crisis, Thirteenth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, Brown University.
March 2021: "X Marks the Spot: Charles Brockden Brown's Monthly Magazine and Periodical Publication." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference.
December 2019: "What is an Instalment? Narrative Scales and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical," Scaling the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Biennial Conference of the British Assocation of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Nottingham/Nottingham Trent University.
October 2019: "Arthur Mervyn's Closet: or, Charles Brockden Brown's Servant Problem, and Ours," Dissent of the Governed: C18 to C21, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Kentucky.
September 2019: "Seriality, Serialization, Series: Textual Temporalities and the Gendering of Post-Revolutionary American Fiction," Serial Gendered Subjects: Periodicals Identities, Communities, Northumbria University.
March 2019: "Serial Poetics, American Periodical Culture, and the Problem of the Picaresque," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Eugene, Oregon.
May 2018 (invited): "Suspense/Desire/Repetition: Serial Poetics and the Early American Novel," Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.
May 2018: "'An Executioner in the Civil State': Periodical Culture and the Reimagining of Social Authority in Jeffersonian America," American Counter/Publics - Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies, Berlin.
March 2018: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth Century Magazine," Climate - Fifth Biennial Conference of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
November 2017: "When Was the First American Novel?: Belatedness, Anachronism, and the Long Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1966)," The 'Not Yet' of the Nineteenth Century - Third Biennial Symposium of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Exeter.
October 2017: "Portrait Miniatures: Physiognomy, Providence, and the Transatlantic Circulation of Wealth in the Post-1800 American Novel," Migration, Diaspora, Circulation and Translation - Eleventh Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University College Dublin.
September 2017: "Early American Periodical Culture and the Problem of the Picaresque," Magazines on the Move - Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium, Nottingham Trent University.
June 2017: "Dead Letters! Does it Not Sound Like Dead Networks? or, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of the Post Office," Melville's Crossings - Eleventh International Melville Conference, King's College London.
April 2017: "The Detective in the Dead Letter Office: Legal Surveillance and the Nineteenth-Century Communications Network," British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, Canterbury Christ Church University.
March 2017: "Seriality, Serialization, Series: Textual Temporalities and the Legitimation of Post-Revolutionary American Fiction," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
March 2017 (respondent): "Beyond Allegories of Nation: Early American Novels as Indices of Political Possibility," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
May 2016: "What, When and Where Was the First American Novel?" Unpublished America Symposium, University of Birmingham
December 2015: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth-Century Magazine." American into Periodicals Studies - Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium, British Library.
November 2015: "'Dead Letters! Does it Not Sound Like Dead Networks?': Bartleby the Postman." Keywords - Second Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Warwick.
October 2015: "Electric Eels and the Penurious Gentry: Native Americans, Natural Philosophy, and the Making of Middle-Cass Identity in Edward Bancroft's The History of Charles Wentworth." Recording Nature in the Early Atlantic World, 1750-1830 - Tenth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, Ybor City, Tampa, Florida
September 2015: "Becoming Proletarian: William Moraley's Unaccountable Self." British Group of Early American Historians Annual Conference, University of Sheffield.
August 2015 (invited): "Transportation Stories: Servants, Convicts, and Class Formation in the Literature of Colonial America." Eccles Centre Summer Scholars Series, British Library.
April 2015 (invited): "A Vast Collection of Particular Truths: Thomas Dobson, Encyclopaedic Knowledge and Information Overload in Post-Revolutionary America." Olin Library, Rollins College, Florida.
April 2014: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth-Century Magazine." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Birmingham.
October 2013: "Secret Witnessing: The Uncanny Servant and the Early American Novel." Acts of Alienation and Sedition, 1780-1830 - Ninth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, Universite Paris IV - Sorbonne.
July 2013: "Before America's First Fictions: English Imports, Periodical Culture, and the Colonial Rise of the Novel." Roots, Routes, and Routs: American and British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century, University of Plymouth.
March 2013: "Parabolic Social Mobility and the Circulation of Wealth in the Post-1800 American Novel." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Savannah, Georgia.
April 2012: "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Speculative Reading and Serial Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century." Speculations: Aesthetics, Risk, and Capital in the Circum-Atlantic World - Eighth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, CUNY Graduate Center, New York.
April 2012: "Temporality and the Serial Novel." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Berkeley, California.
March 2011: "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Seriality and the Making of Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Philadelphia.
May 2010: "An Executioner in the Civil State: Periodical Culture and the Reimagining of Social Authority in Jeffersonian America." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Penn State University and Research Society for American Periodicals Panel at the American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco.
March 2010 (invited): "A Peculiar Craft: The Problem of Social Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-Century America." American History Research Seminar, Cambridge University and Critical MASS: Manchester American Studies Seminar, University of Manchester.
December 2009: "Brother Jonathan Meets John Bull: The Transatlantic Iconography of the Yankee, 1776-1830." Separateness and Kinship: Transatlantic Exchanges Between New England Britain, 1600-1900, University of Plymouth.
July 2009: "Before America's First Fictions: English Imports, Periodical Culture, and the Colonial Rise of the Novel." Narrative Dominions: on Writing the History of the Novel in English, Institute of English Studies, University of London.
May 2009: "Globalizing the Republic of Letters: Language, Provincialism, and American Print Culture at the End of the Eighteenth Century." Society of Early Americanists Panel at the American Literature Association Conference, Boston.
June 2008: "'A Vast Collection of Particular Truths': Encyclopaedic Knowledge and Information Overload in Post-Revolutionary American Print Culture." Bibliographical Society of America Panel at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Conference, Oxford Brookes University.
March 2008: "The Empire of Letters: Native American Culture and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-Century America." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh.
May 2007: "A Silent History: Notes toward a Reconstruction of the Colonial American Theatre." Southwest American Studies Forum, University of Exeter.
April 2006: "'That Grub-Street Sect': Partisan Politics and the Franklinian Image, 1790 - 1808." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Kent, Canterbury.
April 2005: "Legal Fictions: Charles Brockden Brown and the Emergence of Literary Discourse in Eighteenth-Century America." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Cambridge.
CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION
2023: Crime, Justice, and Cultures of Transgression in Early America: The 14th Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Nottingham.
2022: Opening Up, Fifth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, King's College London (co-organized with the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).
2019: Scaling the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Nottingham/Nottingham Trent University (co-organized with Stephanie Palmer).
2019: Dissent of the Governed: C18 to C21, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Kentucky (co-organized with the Charles Brockden Brown Society).
2018: Content Stinks! The Forms, Materials, and Institutions of American Periodicals, University of Nottingham (co-organized with Graham Thompson).
2017: The 'Not Yet' of the Nineteenth Century, Third Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Exeter (co-organized with the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).
2011: Knowledge Networks: American Periodicals, Print Cultures, and Communities, University of Nottingham (co-organized with John Fagg and Robin Vandome).
In my role as Conference Coordinator for the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists I also organized more than twenty BrANCA-sponsored panels at the annual British Association for American Studies conference between 2017 and 2022.
AWARDS AND HONOURS
2021-23: President of the Charles Brockden Brown Society
2017-21: Elected Member of the Steering Committee of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
2017-21: Elected Member of the Advisory Board of the Charles Brockden Brown Society
2020: Society of Early Americanists Scholar of the Month
2015: Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Rollins College, Florida.
2014-15: Eccles Centre Fellowship, British Library.
2010-11: Early Career Research and Knowledge Transfer Grant, University of Nottingham.
2010: Overseas Conference Grant, British Academy.
2007: Barra International Fellowship, The Library Company of Philadelphia.
2006: Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, British Association for American Studies/US Embassy.
2005: Research Fellowship, JFK Insititute for North American Studies, Berlin.
2000-03: Postgraduate Research Degree Studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council.
1999-2000: Postgraduate Taught Degree Studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council.
ACADEMIC SERVICE
Reviewer of book and article manuscripts for: Oxford University Press; Cambridge University Press; Broadview Press; University of Wales Press; Early American Literature; Studies in American Fiction; Journal of American Studies; Journal of Early American History; Eighteenth-Century Studies; Journal of Social History; Literature and History; Religions; The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; Papers on Language and Literature; English: Journal of the English Association; Huntington Library Quarterly.
Tenure/promotion panel evaluations for: University of Kent; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
I am currently and have recently supervised PhD students working on: Ralph Waldo Emerson; John Jay; American loyalism and emotions history; racial liminality in nineteenth-century American fiction; landscape in nineteenth-century Californian literature; urban parks in the Reconstruction-era South; journalism and asylum reform; classical influences on the early American theatre; and transatlantic abolitionism.
My recent MRes supervisees include students working on: space and place in nineteenth-century Californian literature; the indigenous Gothic in Canadian literature; ecocriticism and twenty-first century American fiction; Alexander Hamilton; and sublime representations of Niagara Falls.
Modules I have taught within the Department of American and Canadian Studies include:
African American History and Culture;
American Enlightenment/American Gothic;
American Magazine Culture: Journalism, Advertising and Fiction from Independence to the Internet Age ;
The American Theatre;
American Literature 1 - Colonial Era to 1900;
American Literature 2 - 1900 to the Present;
Key Texts in American Social and Political Thought;
American Thought and Culture 1 - Settlement to World War 1;
American Thought and Culture 2 - World War 1 to the Present;
Identifiably American - An Honors Seminar;
and American Utopianism (for a brief introduction to the latter see my contribution to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies' "Words of the World" series on Youtube: http://youtu.be/RLxe0WKZYlA).
In the coming academic year I will be teaching once again on African American History and Culture and American Magazine Culture.
Past Research
In the now quite-distant past I collaborated with several colleagues in the Department of American Studies at Nottingham, and at the University of Birmingham, on a project which is concerned with the networks of production underpinning American periodical culture in the nineteenth century. The first stage of this project reached fruition in a symposium, entitled Knowledge Networks: American Periodicals, Print Cultures, and Communities which took place at the University of Nottingham in May 2011 with funding from an internal Early Career and Knowledge Transfer grant. A special issue of American Periodicals which developed from this symposium - on the theme of "Networks and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical" - appeared in 2013. More information about this phase of the project can be found here: http://knowledgenetworks.wordpress.com/cfp/. In 2018, along with my colleague Graham Thompson, I organized a related symposium entitled "Content Stinks! The Forms, Materials, and Institutions of American Periodicals" - details of which can be found here: https://periodicalstudies.wordpress.com/2018/06/.
In addition to my ongoing book projects I have also published a wide range of journal articles and book chapters on topics such as: the political thought of African Americans in the eighteenth century; science and its cultural reception during the post-Revolutionary period; transatlantic cultural relations and the idea of the picturesque in the early nineteenth century; the representation of Anglo-American market relations in the theatre during the Jacksonian era; literary nationalism and the historical romance in the 1820s; Georgic representations of literary labor during the American Renaissance; and the relationship between serial publication and the rise of the American novel. An interest in the remarkable cultural transformations which America underwent from the colonial period to the Civil War continues to mark my research.
SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS AND TALKS:
March 2024: "Unexpected Endings: Social Crisis, Form, and the Antebellum Fragment," C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Pasadena.
March 2024: "Posthumous Fragments and the Editing of the Authorial Corpus in Early Nineteenth Century America," Unfolding Editorship Seminar, C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Pasadena.
March 2024: "Speaking in Ancient Tongues: Historical Conjecture and the Early American Fragment," Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865, Essen.
December 2023: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Contemporaneous Literary Fragments, and the Waste of Textual Overproduction." Refuse/Refusal: Fifth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Bristol.
June 2023: "When Was the First American Novel? Temporal Anachronism and the Long, Late Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1969)." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, University of Maryland.
March 2022: "When Was the First American Novel? Temporal Anachronism and the Long, Late Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1969)." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Miami.
February 2022 (invited): "Nobody's Talkin' At Me: Fictionality and the Servant's Voice in Early American Literature." Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865, JFK Institute, Berlin.
October 2021: "A Recipe for Disaster: Social Crisis, Form, and the Early American Fragment." Past Futures: Thinking in Crisis, Thirteenth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, Brown University.
March 2021: "X Marks the Spot: Charles Brockden Brown's Monthly Magazine and Periodical Publication." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference.
December 2019: "What is an Instalment? Narrative Scales and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical," Scaling the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Biennial Conference of the British Assocation of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Nottingham/Nottingham Trent University.
October 2019: "Arthur Mervyn's Closet: or, Charles Brockden Brown's Servant Problem, and Ours," Dissent of the Governed: C18 to C21, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Kentucky
September 2019: "Seriality, Serialization, Series: Textual Temporalities and the Gendering of Post-Revolutionary American Fiction," Serial Gendered Subjects: Periodicals Identities, Communities, Northumbria University.
March 2019: "Serial Poetics, American Periodical Culture, and the Problem of the Picaresque," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Eugene, Oregon.
May 2018 (invited): "Suspense/Desire/Repetition: Serial Poetics and the Early American Novel," Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.
May 2018: "'An Executioner in the Civil State': Periodical Culture and the Reimagining of Social Authority in Jeffersonian America," American Counter/Publics - Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies, Berlin.
March 2018: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth Century Magazine," Climate - Fifth Biennial Conference of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
November 2017: "When Was the First American Novel?: Belatedness, Anachronism, and the Long Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1966)," The 'Not Yet' of the Nineteenth Century - Third Biennial Symposium of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Exeter.
October 2017: "Portrait Miniatures: Physiognomy, Providence, and the Transatlantic Circulation of Wealth in the Post-1800 American Novel," Migration, Diaspora, Circulation and Translation - Eleventh Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University College Dublin.
September 2017: "Early American Periodical Culture and the Problem of the Picaresque," Magazines on the Move - Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium, Nottingham Trent University.
June 2017: "Dead Letters! Does it Not Sound Like Dead Networks? or, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of the Post Office," Melville's Crossings - Eleventh International Melville Conference, King's College London.
April 2017: "The Detective in the Dead Letter Office: Legal Surveillance and the Nineteenth-Century Communications Network," British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, Canterbury Christ Church University.
March 2017: "Seriality, Serialization, Series: Textual Temporalities and the Legitimation of Post-Revolutionary American Fiction," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
March 2017 (respondent): "Beyond Allegories of Nation: Early American Novels as Indices of Political Possibility," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
May 2016: "What, When and Where Was the First American Novel?" Unpublished America Symposium, University of Birmingham.
December 2015: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth Century Magazine." American into Periodical Studies - Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium, British Library.
November 2015: "'Dead Letters! Does it Not Sound Like Dead Networks?': Bartleby the Postman." Keywords - Second Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Warwick.
October 2015: "Electric Eels and the Penurious Gentry: Native Americans, Natural Philosophy, and the Making of Middle-Class Identity in Edward Bancroft's The History of Charles Wentworth." Recording Nature in the Early Atlantic World, 1750-1830 - Tenth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society - Ybor City, Tampa, Florida
September 2015: "Becoming Proletarian: William Moraley's Unaccountable Self." British Group of Early American Historians Annual Conference, University of Sheffield.
August 2015 (invited): "Transportation Stories: Servants, Convicts, and Class Formation in the Literature of Colonial America." Eccles Centre Summer Scholars Series, British Library.
April 2015 (invited): "A Vast Collection of Particular Truths: Thomas Dobson, Encyclopaedic Knowledge and Information Overload in Post-Revolutionary America." Olin Library, Rollins College, Florida.
April 2014: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth Century Magazine." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Birmingham.
July 2013: "Before America's First Fictions: English Imports, Periodical Culture, and the Colonial Rise of the Novel." Roots, Routes, and Routs: American and British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century, University of Plymouth.
March 2013: "Parabolic Social Mobility and the Circulation of Wealth in the Post-1800 American Novel." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Savannah, Georgia.
April 2012: "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Speculative Reading and Serial Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century." Speculations: Aesthetics, Risk, and Capital in the Circum-Atlantic World - Eighth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, CUNY Graduate Center, New York.
April 2012: "Temporality and the Serial Novel." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Berkeley, California.
March 2011: "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Seriality and the Making of Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Philadelphia.
May 2010: "An Executioner in the Civil State: Periodical Culture and the Reimagining of Social Authority in Jeffersonian America." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Penn State University and Research Society for American Periodicals Panel at the American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco.
March 2010 (invited): "A Peculiar Craft: The Problem of Social Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-Century America." American History Research Seminar, Cambridge University and Critical MASS: Manchester American Studies Seminar, University of Manchester.
July 2009: "Before America's First Fictions: English Imports, Periodical Culture, and the Colonial Rise of the Novel." Narrative Dominions: on Writing the History of the Novel in English, Institute of English Studies, University of London.
May 2009: "Globalizing the Republic of Letters: Language, Provincialism, and American Print Culture at the End of the Eighteenth Century." Society of Early Americanists Panel at the American Literature Association Conference, Boston.
June 2008: "'A Vast Collection of Particular Truths': Encyclopaedic Knowledge and Information Overload in Post-Revolutionary American Print Culture." Bibliographical Society of America Panel at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Conference, Oxford Brookes University.
March 2008: "The Empire of Letters: Native American Culture and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-Century America." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh.
May 2007: "A Silent History: Notes toward a Reconstruction of the Colonial American Theatre." Southwest American Studies Forum, University of Exeter.
April 2006: "'That Grub-Street Sect': Partisan Politics and the Franklinian Image, 1790 - 1808." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Kent, Canterbury.
April 2005: "Legal Fictions: Charles Brockden Brown and the Emergence of Literary Discourse in Eighteenth-Century America." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Cambridge.
CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION
2023: Crime, Justice, and Cultures of Transgression in Early America: The 14th Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Nottingham.
2022: Opening Up, Fifth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, King's College London (co-organized with the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).
2019: Scaling the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Nottingham/Nottingham Trent University (co-organized with Stephanie Palmer).
2019: Dissent of the Governed: C18 to C21, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Kentucky (co-organized with the Charles Brockden Brown Society).
2018: Content Stinks! The Forms, Materials, and Institutions of American Periodicals, University of Nottingham (co-organized with Graham Thompson).
2017: The 'Not Yet' of the Nineteenth Century, Third Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Exeter (co-organized with the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).
2011: Knowledge Networks: American Periodicals, Print Cultures, and Communities, University of Nottingham (co-organized with John Fagg and Robin Vandome).
In my role as Conference Coordinator for the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists I also organized more than twenty BrANCA-sponsored panels at the annual British Association for American Studies conference between 2017 and 2022.
AWARDS AND HONOURS
2021-23: President of the Charles Brockden Brown Society
2017-21: Elected Member of Steering Committee of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
2017-21: Elected Member of the Advisory Board of the Charles Brockden Brown Society
2020: Society of Early Americanists Scholar of the Month
2015: Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Rollins College, Florida
2014-15: Eccles Centre Fellowship, British Library
2010-11: Early Career Research and Knowledge Transfer Grant, University of Nottingham.
2010: Overseas Conference Grant, British Academy.
2007: Barra International Fellowship, The Library Company of Philadelphia.
2006: Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, British Association for American Studies/US Embassy.
2005: Research Fellowship, JFK Insititute for North American Studies, Berlin.
2000-03: Postgraduate Research Degree Studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council.
1999-2000: Postgraduate Taught Degree Studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council.
ACADEMIC SERVICE
Reviewer of book and article manuscripts for: Oxford University Press; Cambridge University Press; Broadview Press; University of Wales Press; Early American Literature; Studies in American Fiction; Journal of American Studies; Journal of Early American History; Eighteenth-Century Studies; Journal of Social History; Literature and History; Religions; The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; Papers on Language and Literature; English: Journal of the English Association; Huntington Library Quarterly.
Tenure/promotion panel evaluations for: University of Kent; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Future Research
Between 2021 and 2024 I was a member of the DFG-funded research network Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865 (Voices & Agencies (uni-due.de)), and delivered a keynote address - "Nobody's Talkin' At Me: The Fictionality of the Servant's Voice in Early American Literature" - at its first symposium. Along with the directors of this research network, and fellow early Americanists from the US and UK, I am now developing a collaborative research project entitled Mobile Genres: Early American Literature in the Multiingual Atlantic World, 1660-1830. The project aims to bibliographically document and critically analyze, for the first time, the extent to which texts originally published in German, French, and Spanish were central to print culture in the British American colonies and newly-founded US, and the increasing degree to which Anglophone North American literature began to travel into these languages.
PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2025. Transatlantic Felony: Convict Transportation and Representations of Criminality in the British American Colonies. In: JAMES CAMPBELL and VIVIEN MILLER, eds., The Routledge History of Crime in America Routledge. 103-26 (In Press.)
PETHERS, MATTHEW, MORZE, LEN VON and EMMETT, HILARY, eds., 2025. The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Volume 2: The Monthly Magazine and Other Writings, 1789-1800 Bucknell University Press. (In Press.)
PETHERS, MATTHEW, MORZE, LEN VON and EMMETT, HILARY, 2025. Historical Essay. In: PETHERS, MATTHEW, MORZE, LEN VON and EMMETT, HILARY, eds., The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Volume 2: The Monthly Magazine and Other Writings, 1789-1800 Bucknell University Press. (In Press.)
PETHERS, MATTHEW and MORZE, LEN VON, 2025. Textual Essay. In: PETHERS, MATTHEW, MORZE, LEN VON and EMMETT, HILARY, eds., The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Volume 2: The Monthly Magazine and Other Writings, 1789-1800 Bucknell University Press. (In Press.)
PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2024. A Periodical Masquerade: The History of the Book in Nineteenth-Century America, Unbound. In: RUSS CASTRONOVO and ROBERT LEVINE, eds., The New Nineteenth Century American Literary Studies Cambridge University Press. 186-202 (In Press.)
PETHERS, MATTHEW and COUCH, DANIEL DIEZ, eds., 2024. The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art Bucknell University Press.
PETHERS, MATTHEW and COUCH, DANIEL DIEZ, 2024. Parting with Wholes in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art. In: MATTHEW PETHERS and DANIEL DIEZ COUCH, eds., The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art Bucknell University Press. 1-30
PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2024. William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969) American Literary History. 36(1), 16-50
PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2024. Encyclopaedias, Information Overload, and the Intellectual Division of Labor in Early America Early American Studies. 22(4), 562-612 (In Press.)
PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2024. Remaking Early American Literary Studies (Again) American Literary History. 36(2), 516-23
PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2023. The Face of Poverty: Physiognomics, Social Mobility, and the Politics of Recognition in the Early Nineteenth-Century American Novel J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. 11(1), 91-119
PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2022. Serialization and the Narrative Scales of the Literary Magazine. In: LANZENDOERFER, TIM, ed., The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine Routledge. 45-58
PETHERS, MATTHEW and VON MORZE, LEN, 2022. Periodical Queries: Early American Magazine Writing in and out of the Charles Brockden Brown Canon Early American Literature. 57(2), 555-62
PETHERS, MATTHEW and KOENIGS, THOMAS, 2021. Early American Fictionality Early American Literature. 56(3), 669-98 PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2021. The Periodical Text-Network, Serialized Genres, and the Making of 'Literature' in Nineteenth Century America Nineteenth Century Studies. 33(1), 19-45 (In Press.)
PETHERS, M., 2017. Transportation Narratives: Servants, Convicts, and the Literature of Colonization in British America. In: PAUL LAUTER and NICHOLAS COLES, eds., The History of American-Working Class Literature Cambridge University Press. 7-24
PETHERS, M., 2016. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth Century America. In: BERNIER, C. M., NEWMAN, J. and PETHERS, M., eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press. 136-51
PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. and NEWMAN, J., eds., 2016. The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press.
PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. M. and NEWMAN, J., 2016. Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing. In: PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. M. and NEWMAN, J., eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press. 11-28
PETHERS, M., FAHERTY, D., KOENIGS, T., WEYLER, K., WHITE, E., SILYN ROBERTS, S. and DAVIDSON, C. N., 2016. 21st Century Studies in the Early American Novel Journal of American Studies. 50(3), 779-824
PETHERS, M., 2014. The Secret Witness: Thinking, and Not Thinking, About Servants in the Early American Novel. In: ANDREW LAWSON, ed., Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature Routledge. 40-55
PETHERS, M., 2014. The Early American Novel in Fragments: Reading and Writing Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States. In: PATRICK PARRINDER, ANDREW NASH and NICOLA WILSON, eds., New Directions in the History of the Novel Palgrave Macmillan. 63-75
PETHERS, M., 2013. 'That eternal ghost of trade': Anglo-American market culture and the antebellum stage Yankee. In: PEEL, R. and MAUDLIN, D., eds., The materials of exchange between Britain and north east America, 1750-1900 Ashgate. 83-115
FAGG, J., PETHERS, M and VANDOME, R., 2013. "Introduction: Networks and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical" American Periodicals. 23(2), 93-104 PETHERS, M., FAGG, J. and VANDOME, R., eds., 2013. Networks and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Special Issue of "American Periodicals" - 23 (2)
PETHERS, M., 2012. "I must resemble nobody": John Neal, genre, and the making of American literary nationalism. In: WATTS, E. and CARLSON, D.J., eds., John Neal and nineteenth-century American literature and culture Bucknell University Press. 1-38
PETHERS, M., ROUND, P. H., THOMPSON, G., FAGG, J. and BRIER, E., 2012. Online Roundtable: A History of the Book in America Journal of American Studies. 14(2), E22
PETHERS, M., 2005. Transatlantic Migration and the Politics of the Picturesque in Washington Irving's 'Sketch Book' Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. 9(2), 135-58