Amy Lang

Professor Amy Schrager Lang specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S literature and culture. Her books trace the trajectory of her research from colonial American literature to the negotiation of social class in years following the Civil War. Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England investigates the literary, cultural, and political uses of the story of a seventeenth-century heretic in configuring the limits of dissent in the new republic; The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America explores the literary expression of the crisis of social classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. A recent edited collection, What Democracy Looks Like, gathers essays imagining the consequences for American literary scholarship of the rapidly failing commitment to social democracy in the U.S. and the resistance to that failure. Currently, she is embarked on a study of on women, storytelling, and social welfare focused on the many “undercover” narratives of social investigation written by middle-class observers of the poor at the turn of the twentieth century. She is co-editor of the monograph series Class : Culture for the University of Michigan Press. She teaches undergraduate courses in American literature and social reform, American realism in the Gilded Age, reading and writing U.S. consumer culture, and queer fictions. She has supervised graduate research on topics ranging from realist writing and the new cultural geography, Irish American fiction, medical discourse in nineteenth-century women's autobiographical writing to the history of the working-class hero in American popular music, Southern proletarian fiction, and “fictional” feminism.

Areas of Supervision: U.S literature and culture, class and literary studies, gender, race, and sexualities.

Curriculum Vitae