Faculty Directory - Bio
Christopher Castiglia
Liberal Arts Research Professor of English
Contact:
14 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone: 814-865-9034
cxc67@psu.edu
Chris Castiglia is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Senior Scholar in the Center for American Literary Studies. He is the author of Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Corssing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Chicago, 1996) and Interior States:Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Duke, 2008), and the co-editor of Franklin Evan's; or, the Inebriate (Duke, 2007), Walt Whitman's only publsihed novel. A specialist in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, contemporary queer culture and theory, theories of democracy, and contemporary cultural theory, Castiglia is currently finishing a book on collective memory, mass media, and queer subculture (Ah yes, I Remember It Well, co-authored with Chris Reed) and another on pre-Cold War American Studies and socialist humanism, entitled I Like America. He has served on the editorial board of PMLA, American Literature, and ESQ, and has co-edited special issues of Early American Literature ("Early American Interiiority" with Julia Stern), American Literature ("Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies" with Russ Castronovo), and ESQ ("Come Again? New Approaches to Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America" with Christopher Looby). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Deffamation's Media Studies Project, and has served on the MLA's Election Committee, Delegate Assembly, Davis Prize Selection Committee, and the Executive Committee of the Division in Nineteenth-Century American Literature..
Publications:
Books
Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing and White Womanhood From Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Women in Culture and Society Series, University of Chicago Press (1996).
Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum U.S. New Americanist Series, Duke University Press (2008).
Edited Volumes
- Walt Whitman, Franklin Evans (with Glenn Hendler). Duke University Press (2007).
- Edited Journals
- Early American Literature 37, 1 (2002). Special Issue: Early American Interiority, co-edited with Julia A. Stern
- American Literature 76, 3 (2004). Special Issue: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies, co-edited with Russ Castronovo.
Articles
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"Actually: Hawthorne's Aesthetics of Intimacy" in American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, ed. by Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2010.
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"The Post-Traumatic Possibilities of Post-Queer Memory" in States of Emergency, ed. by Russ Castronovo and Susan Gilman. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009.
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"A Democratic and Fraternal Humanism': The Cant of Pessimism and Newton Arvin's Queer Socialism," American Literary History (January 2009).
- "Alienated Affections: Hawthorne and Melvilles Trans-Intimate Relationship. Writing Relationship: The Hawthorne-Melville Relationship. Ed. Jana Angersinger and Leland S. Person, Jr. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2008.
- Interiority. Keywords of American Cultural Studies. Ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. NYU Press, 2007.
- Pierreâs Bad Associations: The Future of Public Life in the Institutional Nation.†The Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville. Ed. Wyn Kelly. Blackwell, 2006: 197-213.
- " A ˜Hive of Subtlety: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies (with Russ Castronovo), American Literature 76, 3 (September 2004): 423-435.
- "Reform and Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, The Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865. Ed. Shirley Samuels. Blackwell, 2004: 274-284.
- The Marvelous Queer Interiors of The House of the Seven Gables, The Cambridge Companion to Hawthorne. Ed. Richard Millington. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004: 186-206. Reprinted in The House of the Seven Gables: a Critical Edition. Ed. Robert S. Levine. Norton, 2005.
- I found a life of freedom all my fancy had pictured it to be: Hannah Crafts's Visual Speculation and the Inner Life of Slavery,†In Search of Hannah Crafts. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins. Basic Books, 2003: 231-253.
- Ah yes, I remember it well: Memory, Mass Media, and Queer Culture in Will & Grace (with Christopher Reed). Cultural Critique 56 (winter 2004): 158-188. Reprinted in Television: the Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb, Oxford University Press, and in Sexual Identities and Communication in Everyday Life, ed. Karan Lovaas and Lee Jenkins, Sage Publications.
- Early American Interiority (with Julia A. Stern). Early American Literature 37, 1: 1-7.
- "Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth." American Literary History 14, 1 (Spring 2002): 32-59. Reprinted in Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 149. Gale, 2005.
- "The Genealogy of a Democratic Crush," Materializing Democracy. Ed. Dana D. Nelson and Russ Castronovo. Duke Univ. Press (2002): 195-217.
- Where I'm Coming From: Memory, Location, and the (Un)Making of National Subjectivity in Personal Effects. Ed. David Bleich and Deborah Holdstein. Utah State University Press (2001): 317-334.
- "Sex Panics, Sex Publics, Sex Memories." boundary 2 27, 2 (Summer 2000): 149-175
- "The Way We Were: Remembering the Gay '70s" in The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture. Ed. Shelton Waldrep. Routledge (1999): 206-223.
- "Pedagogical Discipline and the Creation of White Citizenship: John Witherspoon, Robert Finley, and the Colonization Society." Early American Literature 33, 2 (Summer l998): 192-214.
- "Captives in History: Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel" in Redefining the Political Novel. Ed. Sharon Harris. Univ. of Tennessee Press (1995): 23-42.
- "Rebel Without a Closet," in Engendering Men. Ed. Joseph Allen Boone and Michael Cadden. Routledge (1990).
- "In Praise of Extra ‘vagant Women: Catharine Sedgwick and the Captivity Romance," Legacy 6, 2 (January 1990): 3-16.
Recent Invited Lectures
- The Huntington Library (October 2007) Symposium on Nineteenth-Century Literary Aesthetics.
- Vanderbilt University (February 2006), Political Feelings Symposium, "Humanism without Humans
- University of California, Los Angeles (November 2005), Bad Associations: Interiority, Institutionality, and Anti-Catholicism
- Chicago Historical Society (February 2005),Lincoln's Queer Intimacies
- University of Maryland (2005), Nervous States, Anxious States, and States of Desire
- Duke University (2002) and Dartmouth College (Futures of American Studies Institute, 2002), The Queer Economies of Desire
- University of Arkansas, Little Rock (2002),Hawthorne's Queer Emotions
FELLOWSHIPS AND PRIZES
- Spring 2001 GLAAD Center for the Study of Media and Society Grant
- Spring l999 Loyola Center for Ethics Faculty Fellowship
- l996-l997 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
- May l992 Distinguished Dissertation in the Humanities, Columbia University
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
- PMLA Editorial Board, 2006-2008
- American Literature Editorial Board
- ESQ Editorial Board, 2008-2010
- Elections Committee, MLA, 2007-2009
- Elected (Midwest Region) Delegate, MLA Delegate Assembly, 2004-2007.
- American Literature Section Advisory Board, MLA, 2004-2005
- Davis Prize Selection Committee (2000-2001)
- MLA Nineteenth Century American Literature Division Executive Committee (2000-2004)
- President, Division in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, MLA, 2004-2005.
