Associate Professor of English,
Director of American Studies

E-mail: j-grossman@northwestern.edu

Jay Grossman (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is currently the Director of Northwestern's American Studies program.  He teaches and writes about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, especially Emerson and Whitman, the history of the book, and the history of sexuality.  His book, Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation, was published in Spring 2003 by Duke University Press.  He has also co-edited (with Betsy Erkkila), Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1996).  For his current work, a cultural biography of the literary critic and political activist F. O. Matthiessen, he has received fellowship support from the ACLS, and in 2002-03 he was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  One section of this biography was published as "The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessen's Whitman, Whitman's Matthiessen" in American Literature (December 1998); another, on the sexual and textual intersections between Whitman, Matthiessen, and T. S. Eliot, is forthcoming in a collection of essays from the Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Conference held in 2005 (University of Nebraska Press).

Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation

Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies

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