
Nineteenth-Century American Literature; Poetry and Poetics; History of the Book, Literature and New Media; Law and Literature
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. She co-directs the Black Bibliography Project with Jacqueline Goldsby (Yale University) and 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
Murray Hall | 105
Tuesdays 1:00-4:00 pm.
- 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
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Taking Liberties with the Author
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- 2013
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American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
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- 2003
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“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.
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“What is a Ballad? Reading for Genre, Format, and Medium,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 70:2 (September 2016), 156-175.
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“American Poetry: What, Me Worry?” (A response to Stephen Burt). American Literary History28:2 (Summer 2016), 288-94.
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“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.
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“Echocriticism: Repetition and the Order of Texts,” American Literature88:1 (March 2016), 1-29.
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“The Poetry of Slavery,” in Ezra Tawil, ed. Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115-136.
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“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.
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“Copyright and Intellectual Property: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 16 (2013), 387-427
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“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.
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“The Future of the Literary Past,” with Andrew Parker, PMLA 125.4 (October, 2010), 959-967
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“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
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“Market,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of American Cultural Studies, Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 149-52
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"Remediating Whitman" PMLA, 2007122:5 (October 2007), 1592-6.
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"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