B.A., Cincinnati; M.A., Ph.D., Chicago

Professor Evans is a specialist in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature as well as the history of anthropology and cultural theory. His research has focused on the historical and theoretical relationships between literature and anthropology, and his essays on this topic have appeared in Visual Anthropology, American Quarterly, and ELH. His book, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 2005) asks the question how artists, authors and social scientists understood and produced notions of social difference in a period before the anthropological notion of culture existed in the English language. He is currently working on two projects: a history of the "little magazines" published in the U.S., Paris and Japan in the 1890s; and an essay on the ongoing legacy of relationship between Jamesian pragmatism and Boasian anthropology’s accounts of pluralism.

Listen to Professor Evans' August 2005 lecture, "The Culture of Culture," on Chicago Public Radio's "The Odyssey," by clicking here.

Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Principles of Literary Study

American Realism and Naturalism

American Vernacular

Nineteenth-Century Black Literature

Survey of American

Literature 1860 to Present

Locating American Realism

American Local Color Fiction

An Infidelity to Realism

Circulation and Cultural Theory

Post-Bellum/Pre-Harlem