Jennifer Greiman

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley

18th- and 19th-century American and transatlantic literature

Humanities 341
442-4043
jgreiman@albany.edu

Curriculumn Vitae (PDF)

Jennifer Greiman received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley (2003), and her B.A. in English and French language and literature from the University of Virginia (1994). Her areas of research and teaching include antebellum American literature, transatlantic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, representations of race, discourses of reform, popular theater, theories of subjection, and public sphere theory. She is at work on a book-length study of theatricality and spectatorship in the 19th-century American public sphere. This project examines representations of public opinion and collective life from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America to Herman Melville's Confidence-man to argue that the antebellum public is most cogently imagined through scenes of coercive spectatorship, rather than through print-mediated spheres of rational discourse. Identifying the ways in which forms of power circulate in the public sphere that are both intimate and spectacular, this work further proposes re-readings of Habermas and Foucault through Tocqueville's democratic theory.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

"Theatricality and Strangeness in The Confidence-Man," for a proposed volume on Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sandborn.

"Racial Violence and the Theatrics of Opinion in Beaumont's Marie," Arizona Quarterly, Spring 2004.

"Sexuality, Violence, and the Construction of a Silent People in the Work of AimŽ CŽsaire and Frantz Fanon." Critical Sense: A Journal of Political and Cultural Theory, Spring 1997.

Recent lectures and conference papers

"Theatricality and Strangeness in The Confidence-man"; invited talk, Syracuse University - SUNY Albany Americanist Exchange, Syracuse University, October 2006.

"'The Thing is New': Subjection and Domestic Tyranny in Tocqueville's Democracy in America"; American Studies Association Annual Convention, Oakland, CA, October 2006.

"The Transatlantic Wreck: Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and GŽricault's 'Raft of the Medusa'"; "Transatlanticism in American Literature: Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe," Oxford University, July 2006.

"A State of the Disciplines Roundtable: The Space of the Public Sphere"; Invited panelist, "CHATS Conference: Structure, Space, Transmigration," University at Albany, SUNY, April 2005.

"Mimetic Reform: Hawthorne's Romance and 19th-century Prison Reform"; Northeast MLA Convention, "The Pen: Prisons in American Fiction," Pittsburgh, March 2004.

"The Prison Reform Movement and The Blithedale Romance"; MLA Convention, "New Perspectives on The Blithedale Romance," New York City, December 2002.

"The Gladiator and the Astor Place Riot: Melodrama and Violence in Antebellum New York"; MLA Convention, "Melodrama," Washington, D.C., December 2000.

Recent Courses

English 305Z, Studies in Writing about Texts (Fall 2006)

English 580, Models of History in Literary Criticism (Fall 2006): Transatlantic Romanticism, Transatlantic Revolution.

English 205Z, Introduction to Writing in English Studies (Spring 2006)

English 323, The 19th-Century American Novel (Spring 2005, Spring 2006)

English 261, American Literary Traditions (Fall 2005)

English 580, Models of History in Literary Criticism (Fall 2005): The Transatlantic Wreck

English 432 American Literature before 1815 (Spring 2005)

English 447, The Historical Imagination (Fall 2004): Transatlantic Sympathies

English 755, Antebellum Spectacle: Literature and Performance in 19th-century America

 

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