William R. Hancock

Professional Bio

I am a doctoral candidate specializing in early and nineteenth-century American literature.

My dissertation project, "'Its History Is Written in Blood': The English Civil War in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture," investigates the Roundhead and Cavalier ghosts that haunted the American political imagination throughout the long nineteenth century. I argue that the American excavation of the seventeenth-century English past in this period represented a search for proto-origins or, put another way, a founding before the Founding. Taking up the writings of figures ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to Theodore Roosevelt, I examine how American writers drew upon archetypes and dramatis personae plucked from historical memory of the Interregnum and Restoration: the Roundhead, the Cavalier, the Lord Protector, the Stuarts, and the regicides.

As an instructor in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), I have taught the following courses:

• ENGL 15: Rhetoric and Composition;
• ENGL 202A: Writing in the Social Sciences;
• ENGL 202C: Technical Writing; and
• ENGL 202D: Business Writing.

I have also conducted one-on-one tutoring with students enrolled in composition courses through the ENGL 5: Writing Tutorial program.