Max Cavitch joined Penn's faculty in 1999, after receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Rutgers.  He teaches all forms and phases of American literature from the beginnings of English contact and settlement to the present day.  His teaching and research interests also include gender and sexuality studies, historical poetics, and cinema.  His book American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. He has also published essays on a variety of topics in the journals American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Screen, and Victorian Poetry.  He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the Penn Humanities Forum, and Cornell's Society for the  (more...)

Amy Kaplan received her Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University, with a specialty in late-nineteenth-century American literature. Working in the interdisciplinary field of American studies, she teaches courses on the culture of imperialism, comparative perspectives on the Americas, and mourning, memory and violence. Her first book, The Social Construction of American Realism, was published by the University of Chicago (1988). She co-edited with Donald Pease, Cultures of U. S. Imperialism (Duke, 1993). Her new book, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, was published by Harvard University Press in 2002. She has received an NEH Fellowship and the Norman Forster prize for the best essay in American Literature in 1998 for "Manifest Domesticity." She has published recent essays on 9/11 and Guantanamo and is currently working on the language and culture of empire today. She has recently published "Imperial Melancholy in America" in  (more...)

David Kazanjian received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. from the University of Sussex, and his B.A. from Stanford University. His area of specialization is transnational American literary and historical studies through the nineteenth century. His additional fields of research are political philosophy, continental philosophy, colonial discourse studies, and Armenian diaspora studies. His book The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minnesota, 2003) offers a comparative study of colonial and antebellum, racial and national formations, and a critique of the formal egalitarianism that animated early U.S. citizenship. He has co-edited (with David L. Eng) Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003), as well as (with Shay Brawn, Bonnie Dow, Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, Deb Meem, and Rhonda Pettit) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: Seventeenth through  (more...)