Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of English
Research Areas: American literature and culture before the Civil War; material culture; history of the book.
My research and teaching are organized around American literature and culture before the Civil War—especially the first fifty years of the US republic. I have particular interests in non-canonical fiction, poetry, and political writing and in the relationship between the literary arts and the stuff of popular and material culture. My current book project considers the ideological operations of print ephemera—broadsides, subscription forms, libels, handbills—from the Stamp Act to the abolitionist movement. Essays of mine have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, The William & Mary Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, Early American Studies, Avidly, and Common-place, among others.
The comparative and interdisciplinary approaches I take in my research extend into the classroom. In every course I teach, I ask students to consider the ways in which apparently extra-literary materials—songs, samplers, ceramics, paintings—can help us understand literary works and the cultures that generated them. Since arriving at BU in 2009, I’ve taught courses on the American Revolution in historical memory, on the Enlightenment in America, on American Novel to 1900, on popular writing from 1776-1900, on American Poetry to 1860, and on representations of the city of Boston.
Selected Publications:
Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
With Megan E. Walsh, ed. An edition of Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (Broadview Press, 2016).
“Deep Background: The Walking Dead,” (Avidly/LA Review of Books, October 30, 2013).
“Entering the Lists: The Politics of Ephemera in Eastern Massachusetts, 1774,” Early American Studies 9.1 (Winter 2011): 187-217
For a detailed academic bio and CV, please see Professor Howell’s Department Profile.