Current Projects

In the summer of 1788, while Americans breathlessly awaited states’ votes on the new US Constitution, a female traveler delivered a lifeless child in a rural inn outside Salem, Massachusetts, before dying herself two weeks later. She turned out to be Elizabeth Whitman, the 37-year-old unmarried daughter of a late respected minister in Hartford, Connecticut, who had been well-known since her teenage years as a poet and intellectual, part of a social circle that had transformed literary culture in the Revolutionary era. Newspaper writers blamed her death on novel-reading and vanity; few friends came to her defense. A decade later Elizabeth Whitman’s story formed the basis of one of early America’s first literary bestsellers, The Coquette; or, the History of Eliza Wharton. Published by “A Lady of Massachusetts” in 1797 and reissued regularly over the nineteenth century, The Coquette helped define understandings of women’s contributions to the new nation, their roles within emerging middle-class family culture, and the impact of restrictions on their education and public expression. Generations of readers made pilgrimages to “Eliza Wharton’s grave,” chipping away at Whitman’s headstone until only a fragmented stump remained. My book reconstructs the social and intellectual atmosphere in which she came of age, opens up a range of topics from female education to early celebrity cultures, and maps the posthumous evolution of Whitman’s “story,” the various interpretations imposed across the decades on her life and her mysterious death. What gave her story such staying power for American readers? What alternative narratives circulated alongside The Coquette to explain her death? Drawing on an array of archival materials – many never before published – this book argues for a new understanding of women’s centrality to early American culture in spite of the sometimes contradictory, often constraining limits imposed on female agency and imagination as the new United States took shape.

Research for this project has been made possible by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society; a W. Jackson Bate/Douglas W. Bryant/American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Fellowship at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; a research fellowship at The Huntington Library, San Marino; and an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Early archival work resulted in an award-winning essay in The William and Mary Quarterly charting the circulation of Whitman’s story and poetry in contemporary newspapers and magazines; an edition of Whitman’s known letters (with a substantial companion essay); a co-edited Norton Critical Edition of Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette and her second novel, The Boarding School; and, most recently, a Broadview edition of “the first American novel,” William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), which also includes commentary on Whitman’s case.

From the early 1960s, when Andy Warhol emerged as an organizing force within the nascent Pop Art movement, to his death in the 1987, when his name had become synonymous with both the pervasiveness and ephemerality of celebrity culture, New York City witnessed a dramatic cultural transformation. An explosion of underground community gave rise to interarts experiments that combined painting, photography, sculpture, film, video and sound recording, poetry, fiction, music, dance, theater, and radio and television broadcasting. In twenty-five interlocking profiles of individuals and scenes – many of them underexamined and underestimated – this book covers an extraordinary quarter-century, arguing that these marginal figures, all of whom helped to shape or were shaped by Warhol’s chameleonic persona and ubiquitous, multifaceted artistic output, also redefined the shape and contours of mainstream American culture.

The project emerges from many years teaching signature courses such as Writing New York, Downtown Scenes, Age of Warhol, and Records both at NYU and NYU Abu Dhabi, as well as from my editorial work, with my colleague Cyrus R.K. Patell, on The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. Early thinking about the project informed my contribution to Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series: a volume on Television’s seminal 1977 album Marquee Moon and the emergence of the legendary downtown rock and roll venue CBGB. I’ve more recently published two essays that explore “the Age of Warhol” as an organizing framework for understanding American literature and media history: one in the volume Timelines of American Literature (2019), ed. Marrs and Hager, and another in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 8: American Fiction since 1940 (2024), ed. Patell and Williams.