Klapper Hall, Room 615
718-997-4668
duncan.faherty@qc.cuny.edu
Research Interests
My most recent work, Incipient Fevers: The Haitian Revolution & the Early Republic of Letters (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2023), explores the impact of the Haitian Revolution on and in early American print culture. The project explores how American writers mobilized a variety of fantasies about Haiti to debate the parameters of the delimited forms of freedom that had established their own republic. My first book Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858 (University of New Hampshire Press, 2007) argues that throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled political and social states through metaphors of home building. During this period, a pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses helped writers to manage previous encounters with settlements, both native and European, and to imagine and remodel a new national ideal. Along with Ed White of Tulane University, I am the co-founder and co-editor of the Just Teach One early American digital humanities textual recovery project (https://jto.americanantiquarian.org/).
Other research interests include late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American and Circum Atlantic literatures, the early Black Atlantic, American Studies, cultural studies, and seriality.
Teaching Interests
I regularly teach undergraduate courses in Early American Literature (English 350), Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature (351), and The Early Black Atlantic (348).
I have taught a range of American Literature courses in our MA program, including a recent course on late eighteenth century cultural production measures how the post-Revolutionary Anglophone world was formed by the exchange of goods, ideas, and peoples. This course aimed to explore the shifting structures of feeling that define notions of democracy, citizenship, empire, nation, and the human after the rupture in colonial relations enacted by the American and Haitian Revolutions.
I look forward to working with MA students interested in late 18th and 19th century American literatures, early African American literature, and American cultural studies.
Selected Publications
Books
Incipient Fevers: The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters (manuscript under contract with Oxford University Press)
Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858 (Hanover: University of New England Press/University of New Hampshire Press, 2007).
Articles and Chapters in Books
“‘Melville knew the score’: Benito Cereno as an Index of Black Atlantic Globality” Textual Practice 35.11 (2021): 1835-1852.
“Remapping the Canonical Interregnum: Periodization, Canonization, & The American Novel, 1800-1820,” in The Blackwell Companion to American Literature (forthcoming, Blackwell-Wiley Publishers, 2020), 478-494.
“Wieland; or, the Transformation of American Literary History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford University Press, 2019), 47-61.
“What We’ve Learned (about Recovery) through the Just Teach One Project,” co-written with Ed White, in Teaching with Digital Humanities Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature, (University of Illinois Press, 2018), 105-117.
“Murder, Robbery, Rape, Adultery, and Incest”: Martha Meredith Read’ Margaretta (1807) and the Function of Federalist Fiction,” in Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812, (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 95-126.
White, Ed & Faherty, Duncan. “Canonical Predicaments.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 34 no. 1, 2017, pp. 194-197.
“Introduction: Towards a History of Texts,” section of “21st-Century Studies in the Early American Novel: A Roundtable on the Thirtieth Anniversary of Revolution and the Word.” Journal of American Studies 50:3 (2016), 784-789.
“The Mischief That Awaits Us”: Revolution, Rumor, and Serial Unrest in the Early Republic,” in The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 58-79.
“On the Hudson River Line: Postrevolutionary Regionalism, Neo-Tory Sympathy, and “A Lady of the State of New-York,” in Mapping Region in Early American Writing (University of Georgia Press, 2015), 138-159.
