Geoffrey R. Kirsch will join the Hamilton School as Assistant Professor of Humanities in academic year 2026-2027. Kirsch is a cultural historian of the nineteenth-century United States. His research interests lie at the intersection of American literature and legal, economic, and political history. He currently holds a Junior Research Fellowship in English at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and worked as a lawyer for several years before returning to academia.
Kirsch’s current book project argues that antebellum American authors and jurists jointly delineated the boundaries of an expanding marketplace. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed both the birth of a distinctly American literature and the integration of local economies into a national market under the sway of an increasingly powerful federal government. Collectively described by economic and legal historians as the “market revolution,” these events—industrial and infrastructural advancement in the Northern states, economic interconnection, and political centralization—are at once reflected in and refracted by the works of writers including Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau.
In a further juxtaposition of legal and literary history, Kirsch’s second book will examine how antislavery writers and activists including Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, and William Lloyd Garrison responded to government censorship and mob violence by developing a robust theory and praxis of free expression and assembly—an extralegal, grassroots free-speech tradition that was ultimately absorbed into judicial interpretations of the First Amendment.
“Infra-Humanism and Infrastructuralism,” Entry in The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Kristen Case and James Finley (forthcoming).
“Higher Law,” The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, edited by Robert Spoo and Simon Stern, 2024.
“Piercing the Corporate Whale: Agents, Principals, and the Personified Impersonal in Moby-Dick,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 26(3) (2024), pp. 55-68.
“‘What’s He a Judge Of?’: Blood Meridian’s Paths of Law,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, 19(3) (2023), pp. 569-583.
“Loss Without Remedy: Moby-Dick and the Laws of Compensation,” PMLA, 138(1) (2023), pp. 37-51.
“Innocence and the Arena: Wharton, Roosevelt, and Good Citizenship,” American Literary Realism, 51(3) (2019), pp. 200-219.
“‘So Much a Piece of Nature’: Emerson, Webster, and the Transcendental Constitution,” The New England Quarterly, 91(4) (2018), pp. 625-650.
“Henry James, Inheritance, and the Problem of the Dead Hand,” Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Journal, 47(3) (2013), pp. 435-465.
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