Todd Nothstein
Todd W. Nothstein received his Ph.D. in English from The State University of New York at Buffalo. His dissertation The Civic Self: The Self-Made Man and Civic Participation from Franklin to Faulkner, examines the ambivalent motif of self-invention in twentieth-century American literature. Tracing the contradictions of the twentieth-century motif to the evolution of democratic citizenship in early America, this work begins with the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and considers the contruction of the masculine citizen in the writing of Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. He is currently researching the development of civic self-consciousness in early American captivity narratives. He lives in Harrison College House as a scholar-in-residence with his partner, Frank, the House Dean of Harrison.