Shirley Samuels

Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies

250 Goldwin Smith Hall
shirley.samuels@cornell.edu
607/255-3994

Education

University of California, Berkeley, PhD
University of California, Berkeley, MA
University of California, Berkeley, BA

Departments and programs

American Studies Program
Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
History of Art and Visual Studies
Literatures in English

Affiliated Colleges

College of Arts and Sciences

Academic interests

Cultural Studies
Gender and Sexuality
Pre-20th Century American

Keywords

American women; women's fiction

Overview

Shirley Samuels is the Picket Family Chair of the Literatures in English Department. She is working on a book called "Haunted by the Civil War." She teaches at Cornell in several departments, including American Studies, English, History of Art and Visual Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her books include Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. (2019), The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln (2012), Reading the American Novel 1780-1865 (2012), Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (2004); Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865 (2004); Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (1996); and The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th Century America (1992). In addition to Cornell, she has taught at Princeton University, Brandeis University, and the University of Delaware. She has held fellowships from The American Council of Learned Societies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Huntington Library.

Research Focus

American literature and culture
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American fiction
Feminist criticism
American studies
Late 20th-Century Women Writers and Visual Culture
Narratives of Mobility and Escape in Nineteenth-Century America
Social and Sexual Constructions of Whiteness, Ethnicity, and Race