Jeffrey Steele

Professor
jsteele@wisc.edu
www.jeffsteele.com

Degrees and Institutions

PhD, Harvard University, 1981
MA, Harvard University, 1977
MAT., Harvard University Graduate School of Education, 1971
BA magna cum laude, Carleton College, 1969

Research Interests

American studies, 19th-century urban writing, 19th-century American women's writing (especially Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson), representations of race in literature and advertising; cultural studies, theories of space, material culture.

Selected Publications

Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller's Writing (2001); The Essential Margaret Fuller (1993), The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance (1987); “Crises of Relationship: Developing Relational Models for the Study of the American Renaissance,” ESQ: A  Journal of the American Renaissance, 49:1-3 (2003); "The Limits of Political Sympathy: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Woman's Rights," in The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and  Social Reform (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001); "Reduced to Images: American Indians in 19th-Century Advertising," in The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader (New York University Press, 2000); "Douglass and Sentimental Rhetoric," in Approaches to Teaching the Narrative of the Life of  Frederick Douglass (MLA, 1999); "Transcendental Friendship: Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau," in The Cambridge Companion to Emerson (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999); "The Gender and Racial Politics of Mourning in Antebellum America," in An Emotional History of the United States (NYU Press, 1998); "The Politics of Mourning: Cultural Grief-Work from Frederick Douglass to Fanny Fern," in Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1996).

Work in Progress

I am currently working on two book projects: 1) on spatial paradigms and urban consciousness in antebellum New York writers, and 2) on representations of race in late 19th-century American literature and advertising.

Teaching

I regularly teach courses on 19th-century American women's writing, the American Renaissance, and the history of American poetry.  Recently, I have developed a new course "Writing the City: 19th-century New York."