Meredith L McGill's research and teaching focuses on American literature, book and media history, and poetry and poetics. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1837-1853 (2003; repr. 2007) a study of nineteenth-century American resistance to tight control over intellectual property. She has edited two collections of essays: Taking Liberties with the Author (2013), which explores the persistence of the author as a shaping force in literary criticism, and The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), in which a variety of scholars model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry within a transatlantic frame. Her overview of the last thirty-five years of scholarship on book history and intellectual property can be found in Book History 16 (2013). She is currently completing a study of poetry and mass-culture in the antebellum US. 

In 2019-20 she was Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

From 2018-2020, she was President of C19:  The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and had the good fortune to work with a remarkable team of colleagues both to plan the biennial conference and to transform it into a virtual one as the pandemic disrupted our arrangements.

Chair, 2021-2024

Steering Committee, Digital Humanities Initiative

• Walt Whitman
• Edgar Allan Poe
• What is a Book?
• Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
• The Poetry of Slavery
• Introduction to American Literature
• Principles of Literary Study: Poetry
• Blogging:  Prehistory, Theory, Practice
• Literary History as Media History
• Transcendentalism and Reform
• American Women Writers to 1900
• Topics in Literary Theory: Authorship

• Nineteenth-Century American Woman Writers:  Gender, Sexuality, and the Literary Marketplace
• The Poetry of Slavery
• Literary New York:  Poe, Whitman, Melville
• Nineteenth-Century Poetic Genres:  A Transatlantic Approach
• Literature and New Media
• Whitman, Dickinson, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry, with Mark Doty
• Antebellum American Literature and Culture
• Literary Properties
• American Poetry and Poetics, 1650-1900
• Print Cultures in the 19th and 20th Century United States
• American Epic: The Long Poem in the Whitmanian Tradition
• Transcendentalism and Reform
• Troubled Nationalism: The Irish-American Atlantic, with Marjorie Howes

• Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2019
• Mellon Foundation award, with Jacqueline Goldsby (Yale University), to support the Black Bibliography Project, 2019-2021
• Class of 1932 Fellow, Council of the Humanities, Department of English, and the Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, Spring 2016
• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society 2003-4
• NEH/ Newberry Library Fellowship, 1995-6
• Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 1995

• President, C19, 2018-2020
• Trustee, English Institute, 2015-2021
• Executive Committee, Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Modern Language Association, 2011-16
• General Editor, ACLS e-book series, Selected Essays from the English Institute, 2010-13

• “Format,” Early American Studies special issue on “Keywords in Early American Literature and Material Texts,” ed. by Marcy Dinius and Sonia Hazard (Fall, 2018), 671-7.

• “What is a Ballad?  Reading for Genre, Format, and Medium,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 70:2 (September 2016), 156-175.

•  “American Poetry:  What, Me Worry?” (A response to Stephen Burt).  American Literary History28:2 (Summer 2016), 288-94.

•  “Literary History, Book History, and Media Studies” in Hester Blum, ed. Turns of Event:  American Literary Studies in Motion (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 23-39.

•  “Echocriticism: Repetition and the Order of Texts,” American Literature88:1 (March 2016), 1-29.

•  “The Poetry of Slavery,” in Ezra Tawil, ed. Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature  (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115-136.

• “The Perils of Authorship, Literary Property and Nineteenth-Century American Fiction,”  with Lara Langer Cohen, Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol 5: The American Novel to 1870, J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person, eds. (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014), 195-212.

• “Copyright and Intellectual Property: The State of the Discipline,”  Book History 16 (2013), 387-427

• “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,”  in Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture.  (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 53-74.

• “The Future of the Literary Past,”  with Andrew Parker, PMLA 125.4 (October, 2010), 959-967

• “Walt Whitman and the Poetics of Reprinting,”  in David Blake and Michael Robertson eds., Where the Future Becomes Present: Whitman and Leaves of Grass.  (Iowa City:  University of Iowa Press, 2008), 37-58

• “Market,”  in Keywords: A Vocabulary of American Cultural Studies, Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, eds.  (New York:  New York University Press, 2007), 149-52

• "Remediating Whitman"  PMLA, 2007122:5 (October 2007), 1592-6.

• "Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" 
  ALH: American Literary History, March 2007, 357-74

PhD, Johns Hopkins University
MA, (Cantab) Emmanuel College
BA, Williams College