I’m a faculty member in NYU’s Department of English, where I’ve taught undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature and culture since 2001. My work focuses on two broad areas: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, and New York City writing from the Dutch colonial period to the present. My training, scholarship, and teaching are interdisciplinary; I received my Ph.D. from Boston University in American Studies and describe myself as a cultural historian of writing. As a result, my literary history courses tend to double as cultural history courses. In them I direct a significant amount of attention to issues of method and discipline, including questions about the status of literary texts and interpretation as categories of historical evidence.

I live with my family as Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Residential College at Broome Street.

This semester (spring 2010) I am team-teaching the undergraduate lecture course Writing New York with Professor Cyrus Patell. I’m also directing admissions to our department’s Ph.D. program.

This site exists primarily to archive information about my teaching, research, and professional writing. I blog about New York literature, culture, and history at A History of New York (a.k.a. PWHNY) and about miscellaneous topics at The Great Whatsit (on hiatus at the latter). I’m on the editorial board of common-place, an online quarterly magazine about early American culture. Follow @pwhny or @_waterman on Twitter, depending on your likes. You can become a fan of PWHNY on Facebook (thanks!), but I don’t go in for that Facebook thing myself.

Contact information:

Bryan Waterman
Associate Professor
Department of English
New York University
13-19 University Place, room 538
New York, NY 10003
212/998-8819
bryan.waterman@nyu.edu

Office hours:

M 11:30-12:30, T 1-3