Graham Thompson
Associate Professor of American Studies/Head of Department, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Teaching Summary
In 2011-12 I am teaching on a new first-year undergraduate module called Approaches to American Culture. This is a year-long module intended to introduce students to the interdisciplinary nature of… read more
Research Summary
My current research focuses on Herman Melville's magazine fiction. It thinks about Melville as part of the print culture industry of the 1850s and explores in more detail how magazine publishing… read more
Selected Publications
THOMPSON, G., 2012. The "Plain Facts" of Fine Paper in "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" American Literature. 84(3), (In Press.)
THOMPSON, G., 2012. “Through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life”: Melville’s Not Quite White Working Bodies Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. (In Press.)
In 2011-12 I am teaching on a new first-year undergraduate module called Approaches to American Culture. This is a year-long module intended to introduce students to the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies through a series of case studies. In the first semester these are nineteenth-century publishing, the minstrel show, the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the culture of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city. In the second semester students examine consumer culture in the 1920s, the great depression, popular music in the 1950s, public art in the 1980s and the war on terror. The aim of this module is to introduce students to new material they might not have encountered before but also to develop their ability to interpret and analyse primary and secondary sources with a view to understanding the relationship between American history and culture more generally.
I am also teaching on an MA module which examines American Studies methodologies as they have developed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This module is taught with colleagues who can offer expertise in a particular field. Through a series of workshops, the module looks at the founding principles of the discipline as they developed from the 1920s through to the 1960s and the challenges to these principles after the 1960s as new objects of study and critical approaches have emerged.
At Nottingham I have also taught specialist modules which have grown out of my research--on Herman Melville and American culture in the 1980s, for instance--and this is in line with much of the teaching that goes on in the Department.
I am currently supervising PhD students working on Emerson, John Cheever, Cormac McCarthy, post-apocalyptic fiction and contemporary American literature. In the past I have supervised PhDs on topics including post-suburban American literature; the nineteenth-century American short story; transnationalism in the work of Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand; and contemporary New York and Shanghai fiction. I have also supervised several MRes theses on subjects ranging from the sea fiction of James Fenimore Cooper to Rolling Stone magazine and the short fiction of Richard Ford.
Current Research
My current research focuses on Herman Melville's magazine fiction. It thinks about Melville as part of the print culture industry of the 1850s and explores in more detail how magazine publishing developed and operated in order to better understand how cultural products like Melville's fiction were formed and circulated within it. I am particularly interested in the period before publication, Melville's interaction with the publishers and editors of Putnam's and Harper's, and the materiality of the artefacts of writing and printing.
Past Research
I have a longstanding research interest in the place of business and work in American culture, both the way in which business is used to frame discussions of national identity and the way that labouring bodies are represented as they come into contact with the cultures of business. My first book, Male Sexuality under Surveillance, is a study of heterosexual male representations of office culture in American fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, Lee Edelman and Jonathan Dollimore it looks at Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' (1853), William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922), Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Don DeLillo's Americana (1971), Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine (1988) and The Fermata (1994), and Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995).
My second book, The Business of America, continued this interest with business and examined the complex linking of business and nationhood in post-war United States literature against the backdrop of changing concepts of the nation in the field of American Studies. The first part of the book looks at how white male literary culture has been largely hostile to business during period and how it has represented transnational shifts in the nature of business as threats to supposedly American values like the individual, the family, or freedom. The book charts the way that such an uneasiness towards business relies upon a discourse about America, business and empire that becomes increasingly untenable in the post-war world. By way of comparison, the second part of the book looks at how literature by women and by writers from different racial, ethnic and sexual groups often deals with business through the lens of work .
My most recent book, American Culture in the 1980s, looked beyond the common label of 'Ronald Reagan's America' to examine the complex intersection of cultures in the 1980s. In doing so it examines the major cultural forms of 1980s America - literature and drama; film and television; music and performance; art and photography - and influential texts and trends of the decade: from White Noise to Wall Street, from Silicon Valley to MTV, and from Madonna to Cindy Sherman. The book finishes with a focused chapter which considers the changing dynamics of American culture in an increasingly globalised marketplace.
Future Research
Paper in the nineteenth century