Russ Castronovo

Jean Wall Bennet Professor of English and American Studies (2002)
608-263-7467
rcastronovo@wisc.edu

Degrees and Institutions

PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz
BA, University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests

American literature, African American literature, American Studies, cultural theory and popular culture

Selected Publications

Beautiful Democracy:  Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2007); Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, co-edited with Dana Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Aesthetics and the End(s) of American Cultural Studies: Special Issue of American Literature, co-edited with Chris Castiglia (forthcoming). Plus articles in boundary 2, American Literary History, New Literary History, American Literature, PMLA on figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Current Projects

I've just begun a project on the relationship between propaganda and literature.  My starting point is Tom Paine, revolution, and the British East India Company.

Personal Statement

I am interested in the uses of literature in forming critical citizenship. In my classes, this interest entails a commitment to analytic exchange and dialogue, collective interpretation, and interdisciplinary pursuits of knowledge. My classes seek to implement this approach by ranging across topics such as modern critical theory, popular culture, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, propaganda, and the political novel.