About

Originally from Queens, NY, I’ve been teaching at Stony Brook since 2005. I’m currently Chair of the English Department. I’m the author of Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities (2019) and On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (2012). My current book project is a cultural history of American high school English, The High School Canon: The History of a Civic Tradition. I’m the recipient of a 2019-20 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and an upcoming fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. With Jonna Perrillo of the University of Texas, El Paso, I am Co-Directing a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for Teachers, “Making the Good Reader and Citizen: This History of Literature Instruction at American Schools.”

Recent publications include:

Please contact me at andrew.newman@stonybrook.edu. @DrewNewman@hcommons.social

Education

PhD: University of California, English

MA: University of Chicago, Comparative Literature

BA: Binghamton University

Other Publications

Allegories of Encounter CoverBooks

Articles and Chapters in Books

  • Newman, Andrew. “‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’: The Great Gatsby in the 1980s.Changing English, vol. 25, no. 2, Apr. 2018, pp. 208–15. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/1358684X.2018.1458212.

  • “Captivity: From Babylon to Indian Country.” In Blackwell Companion to American Literature, edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul, Vol. I. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, Forthcoming.

  • “Indigeneity and Early American Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature 27 Feb. 2017. Web.

  • “‘It Couldn’t Be Robbery To Steal That’: Artistic Appropriation and Twain’s ‘Jumping Frog.’” College Literature 42, no. 3 (2015): 396–419. (Co-Authored with Brandi So)

  • “Early Americanist Grammatology: Definitions of Writing and Literacy.” In Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas, edited by Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, 76–98. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

  • “Closing the Circle: Mapping a Native Account of European Land Fraud.” In Early American Cartographies, edited by Martin Bruckner, 248–75. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011.

  • “Fulfilling the Name: Catherine Tekakwitha and Marguerite Kanenstenhawi (Eunice Williams).” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 28, no. 2 (2011): 232–56.

  • “‘Light Might Possibly Be Requisite’: Edgar Huntly, Regional History, and Historicist Criticism.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 322–57.

  • “The Walam Olum: An Indigenous Apocrypha and Its Readers.” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (2010): 26–56.

  • “Sublime Translation in the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59, no. 1 (June 1, 2004): 1–26.

  • “Captive on the Literacy Frontier: Mary Rowlandson, James Smith, and Charles Johnston.” Early American Literature 38, no. 1 (2003): 31–65.


Editorial

  • “The Dido Motif in Accounts of Early Modern European Imperialism.”  Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction. 41.1 (2017): 129–150.

  • Ned Landsman and Andrew Newman eds. The Worlds of Lion Gardiner: Special Issue of Early American Studies 10:2 (May 2011).

  • Lion Gardiner, “Relation of the Pequot Warres” Early American Studies 10:2 (May 2011) 462-489.


Short Articles

Book Reviews

  • Newman, Andrew. “Anglo-American Women Writers and Representations of Indianness, 1629–1824 by Cathy Rex (Review).” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 35, no. 2, Dec. 2016, pp. 531–33. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tsw.2016.0039.

  • Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832, edited by Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke. Early American Literature 49.3 (2014): 821–824.

  • The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America by Joshua Piker. Journal of American History 101.1 (2014): 240–241.

  • English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750—1830 by Hilary Wyss. New England Quarterly 86.1 (2013): 149-152.

  • Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism by Andy Doolen and The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America by Ed White. Early American Literature 41: 3 (2006) 592-600

  • Dry Bones and Indian Sermons by Kristina Bross. William and Mary Quarterly 61:4 (2004) 747-750

Projects

The High School Canon: The History of a Civic Tradition.


High school English is an essential, overlooked topic in American literary and cultural history. From the WW2-era, it has been the forum for a national, intergenerational discussion, shaped by conceptions of the role of literature in a democracy, about a shared set of texts; an overarching theme has been “The American Way of Life” –  individualism, freedom, equality, the American Dream. The analysis of sources such as lesson plans, classroom editions, and student writing reveals how books such as Julius Caesar, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby have been part of the preparation for American citizenship, even as, along with teachers’ approaches and students’ frames of reference, their meaning has changed for different generations. Americans today are still participating in, as well as challenging, this cultural tradition. As an exploration of U.S. history through the prism of the high-school canon, this book will address a broad, general-interest audience.

Memberships

Modern Language Association

Society of Early Americanists

History of Education Society

National Council of Teachers of English

Andrew Newman (he/him)

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@drewnewman13

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