What can you find an American Studies professor reading? We asked Shirley Samuels, Director of American Studies, to share a few comments about her favorite books at the moment. Here's what she had to say!
1. Lenora Warren, Fire on the Water
This book was written by the new faculty member, Lenora Warren, who has also just become the Director of Undergraduate Studies for American Studies. She’s currently working on another book on Phillis Wheatley, but continues to be interested in stories about the ocean. Highly recommended peek into early 19th century stories about sailors, abolition, slavery, and especially the sea.
2. Brigitte Fielder, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteeth-Century America
This book presents a moving account of the ways that family relations and the history of slavery in the United States affect the writing of the nineteenth century. According to Fielder, race can travel across generations in more than one way, often unpredictably.
3. Melissa Gniadek, Oceans at Home
Turning to the ocean as a domain associated with men’s writing in the 19th-century U.S., Melissa Gniadek opens new worlds for consideration. The women writers she presents, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, are often not familiar as writers about the sea. In the hands of Melissa Gniadek, these women’s stories open on the Pacific as well as the Atlantic Ocean.
4. Koritha Mitchell, From Slave Cabins to the White House
This recent book has been very influential for students of 19th century literature who want to think about how the history of race involves remaking the idea of home.
5. Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America
In taking on the history of sentimentality in the nineteenth-century U.S., Xine Yao opens a category of racial indifference. Moving from Herman Melville to Sui Sin Far, the book explores new concepts of how feeling and race become intertwined.
