PROFESSOR CYNTHIA HAMILTON

PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN LITERATURE AND HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT

 

I received a AB cum laude from Wheaton College, Massachusetts and a D.Phil. in American Studies from the University of Sussex. I have served on the Executive Committee of the British Association for American Studies and on the Board of the Collegium for African American Research. I am currently the Secretary of CAAR and a General Editor of the FORECAAST Series, sponsored by CAAR and published by Liverpool University Press. I have been a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, and a Peterson Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. I was recipient of the 1997 Arthur Miller Prize for an essay on Toni Morrison. My work examines the dynamics of popular literary genres including slave narrative, the temperance tale, the captivity narrative, the western, detective fiction, the gothic, and sentimental reform literature.

 

Western and Hard-boiled Detective Fiction in America, 1890-1940 (1987) helped to establish the complex interactive dynamics of conventional elements within formula literature, and the scope available within the formula for innovation by individual authors. Subsequent work has sought to extend our understanding of the dynamics of popular literary genres and to expose the ways in which racism is inscribed in and perpetuated by American popular culture. I contextualise genre literature in relation to cultural and intellectual history. I teach courses on American popular literature and lecture on American literature more generally. Recent publications have included “‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’: Phrenology and Antislavery,” Slavery and Abolition (2008); “Spreading the Word: ‘The Dairyman’s Daughter’ as Model Tract,” Book History (2011); and “Detective Fiction” in Companion to Twentieth Century American Fiction, David Seed, ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). I am currently completing a monograph on the detective fiction of Sara Paretsky for Manchester University Press.