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.

In the summer 2010 term I am teaching an intensive two-week undergrad seminar on New York’s Downtown scenes in the 60s and 70s, as well as a grad seminar on the American novel to 1855.

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 (thru 5/31):

M 4-5; Th 11-12