Christopher Castiglia

Professional Bio

My research and teaching interests are primarily in nineteenth-century US literature, queer studies, and gender/sexuality theory.  To date I have published four monographs: Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst; Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy; If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (co-authored with Christopher Reed); and The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times.  In addition, I edited, with Susan Gillman, Neither the Time Nor the Place:  The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies, and edited, with Glenn Hendler, an edition of Walt Whitman’s temperance novel, Franklin Evans.  My recent essays have appeared in collections such as Ahab Unbound:  Melville and the Materialist Turn; Democracies in America: Keywords for the Nineteen Century and Today; Literary Studies and Human Flourishing; American Literature in Transition; Critique and Postcritique; The New Whitman Studies; and In Search of Hannah Crafts. I am co-founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and founding co-editor of its journal, J19.   I have directed 15 completed dissertations, the authors of which, exception of two who decided not to pursue academic positions, are all currently in teaching positions. I am currently completing a memoir titled Sitcoms Saved My Life and  a monograph on nineteenth-century US literature and civic values  for a post cancel culture.