Marcy Dinius
Marcy Dinius received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She specializes in American literature and culture to 1865, with particular interests in visual and material culture, representations of race and gender, and the novel. A Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum for 2005-06, she is completing her book, The Camera and the Pen: American Literature in the Daguerreian Age. This study argues for the fundamental interdependence of antebellum literature and early photography in analyzing various print-cultural responses to daguerreotypy, including Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Melville’s Pierre, and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She is also at work on a second book-length project—a comparative study of nineteenth century American fiction and twentieth century film—that extends her interest in the relationship of word and image into the age of the motion picture. Essays from her research and teaching are forthcoming in ESQ, Poe Studies, and the MLA Guide Teaching Poe's Poetry and Prose.