Work in Progress

From James T. Fields’s “A Free-Lecture Experience,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 49, no. 343 (June 1879): 76–83.

The Podium in Print: The Popular Lecture in American Literary Culture, 1865–1914

In The Podium in Print, I identify the literary lecture as a bridge between oratory and print, arguing for the lecture’s centrality to a thriving nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Lectures, whether delivered on the platform, transcribed on the printed page, or represented in the fiction of Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, among others, initiated important conversations about oratory’s unstable position in a developing intellectual hierarchy. By studying lectures and their literary representations alongside agency-sponsored advertisements, circulars, programs, and contemporary newspaper coverage, I read lectures as key components in the conception of nineteenth-century authorship and American literary studies.

For information on past projects, see Scholarship.