Past Directors

I was trained as a Romanticist and received my PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000.  I continue to write and teach about Romantic literature, politics, and culture, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. I also teach undergraduate theory courses and Bible as Literature. In 2017-2018 I was Interim Chair of the Department of English; in 2018 I was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor of English at Lancaster University, England. 

Romanticism has always interested me less as a historical period than as a set of conceptual and theoretical problems (involving subjectvity, selfhood, language, secularization, ontology, and political agency) that sometimes find purchase in other periods or styles. I have also published quite a bit in the burgeoning fields of secular and post-secular studies, and in the field of Religion and Literature. Finally, I have a long-standing interest in cognitive science, particularly theories of consciousness, and in the history of philosophy more generally.

I am currently working on two separate book-length projects. The first, provisionally titled Eternity's Demand, is a study of selfhood in literature and religion, with particular reference both to Romanticism and to the existential tradition from Kierkegaard to Sartre to Malick. The second is a book on the political possibilities of Romanticism, provisionally entitled Careless Steps. Reading Romanticism as a set of experiments in embodiment, this project will include chapters on panpsychism, animism, the commons, and walking.

 I have been the Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis since 2019, but my association with the Center goes back to my very first year at Rutgers, in 2000-01, when Michael Warner directed a remarkable seminar on "Secularism" that would shape my work for the next decade or more.  Some years later, I co-directed seminars with Jonathan Kramnick (on "Mind and Culture") and with Jorge Marcone (on "Objects and Environments"), both of which have continued to resonate in my intellectual life.  In short, the CCA has been a central part of my own intellectual life and development at Rutgers, and my goal is to make that happen for as many colleagues as possible.

I teach the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, gender, and book history.  At Rutgers, I founded and direct the Initiative for the Book. My books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic Books, 2019, Ukrainian translation 2020; Christian Gauss Prize); How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton UP, 2012; Patten Prize, Channing Prize, honorable mention for James Russell Lowell Prize) and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 2000). I also edited Further Reading (with Matthew Rubery, Oxford UP 2020), Unpacking my Library: Writers and their Books (Yale UP, 2011); and Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (with Pamela Thurschwell).  I write for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and Public Books (where I am also a section editor).

Henry S. Turner is Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Humanities and Arts and Professor of English at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, where he has taught since 2007. He specializes in Renaissance literature and intellectual history, especially drama, philosophy, and the history of science. He is the author of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-1630 (Oxford, 2006), Shakespeare’s Double Helix (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2008), and The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651 (Chicago, 2016). . His articles, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Annals of Science, Configurations, differences, ELH, Isis, JEMCS, Nano, postmedieval, Public Books, Renaissance Drama, Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, South Central Review, and The Spenser Review, as well as in a wide range of edited collections.  With Mary Thomas Crane (Boston College), he co-edits the “Penn Series in Literature and Science” (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Professor Turner’s work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and by a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

William Galperin is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers, where he specializes in the literature and culture of the British Romantic period. He is the author of Revision and Authority in Wordsworth (1989), The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Johns Hopkins, 1993), and The Historical Austen (2002). His new book, The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday, was published by Stanford University Press in 2017. He is the recipient of the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research, as well as of awards from the ACLS, the NEH, and the Howard Foundation.

Meredith L. McGill is a Professor of English. Her research and teaching focuses on American literature, book and media history, and poetry and poetics. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1837-1853 (2003; repr. 2007) a study of nineteenth-century American resistance to tight control over intellectual property. She has edited two collections of essays: Taking Liberties with the Author (2013), which explores the persistence of the author as a shaping force in literary criticism, and The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), in which a variety of scholars model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry within a transatlantic frame.

She co-directs the Black Bibliography Project with Jacqueline Goldsby (Yale University).  In 2022, the BBP was awarded a significant grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the "implementation phase" of the project.  You can read more about this project and the field of Black Bibliography itself in a special issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (Summer 2022); the introduction she co-wrote with Jacqueline Goldsby is open access.

Michael Warner was the Board of Governor’s Professor of English at Rutgers University. He specializes in early American literature and print culture, queer theory, new media, and secularism. He is the author of The Letters of the Republic (1990), The Trouble with Normal (1999), and Publics and Counterpublics (2002), and he has edited and co-edited numerous books, including Fear of a Queer Planet (1993), The English Literatures of America: 1500-1800 (1997), and Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010). The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, Professor Warner is currently the Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University.

The founder of the CCA, George Levine is the Kenneth Burke Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Rutgers University. During his career, he published many books on Victorian literature, literary realism, science, and secularism: The Boundaries of Fiction (1968), The Realistic Imagination (1981), Darwin and the Novelists (1988), Lifebirds (1997), Dying to Know (2002), Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (2006), How to Read the Victorian Novel (2007), Realism, Ethics, and Secularism (2008) and Darwin The Writer (2011). He has received numerous awards, including prestigious fellowships from the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.