Kirk McAuley
Assistant Professor
Biography
Kirk McAuley received his Ph.D. in British & American literature from the State University of New York, University at Buffalo in 2006. Since then, he has taught in the Expository Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma, and the Division of Humanities at New College (the honors college) of Florida.
Research / Teaching Interests:
McAuley’s research and teaching focus on American and British literature & culture from the colonial period to 1900, with emphasis on the ‘long’ eighteenth century, transatlantic studies &/or Empire writing, print culture, nature writing / environmental literature, gender studies, and religious discourse.
He is currently at work on a book-length manuscript – “The ‘Chaos of Publication’” – which examines the proliferation of print in Scotland and America, from the Great Awakening (1740s) to the publication of Tabitha Tenney’s novel, Female Quixotism, in 1801. Providing an alternative to Jürgen Habermas’s claim that this revolution in printing democratized the culture of writing, McAuley argues that Scottish and American readers and writers resisted the rising cultural authority of ‘impersonal’ writing (print) as an instrument of British imperialism, while simultaneously embracing its capacity as a mass medium to quell political unrest lingering after their rebellions against the British Empire.
He has taught or will teach a variety of courses in 18th-century British & early American literature, including transatlantic studies (‘Empire Writing’), film as literature (‘Imperial Eyes’), 19th – century wilderness narratives (a course titled ‘Roughing It,’ including The Journals of Lewis & Clark & Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains), religious discourse, and (in the honors college) a course titled ‘Survivor Culture,’ which investigates Americans’ persistent fascination with narratives of survival, from Indian Captivity Narratives and Robinson Crusoe to Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams and Spike Lee’s ‘requiem’ / documentary, “When the Levees Broke.”
Publications:
“Periodical Visitations”: Yellow Fever as Yellow Journalism in Charles Brockden
Brown’s Arthur Mervyn,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19:3 (Spring 2007).
“‘She fleets, she sails away’: The Horror of Highland Emigration in James Macpherson’s
Fragments of Ancient Poetry,” Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations (15 April 2004), Online, available http: www.star.ac.uk/Archive/Publications.htm (University of Edinburgh).
Articles in Progress:
“Noise Abatement: From George Whitefield’s ‘huge loud voice’ to the
“torrent’s roar” in James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian
“‘Art Transforms the Savage Face of Things’: the ’45 in James Grainger’s West-Indian
Georgic, The Sugar Cane”
Contact
- Avery Hall 345
- 335-3023
- lmcauley@wsu.edu
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