Julia Stern

Associate Professor of English & American Studies

University Hall Room 415
Telephone: (847) 491-3530
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: j-stern3@northwestern.edu

Julia Stern (Ph.D. English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University ) teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American literature, Faulkner, women's writing, gothic and sentimental fiction, narrative and psychoanalytic theory, and critical race studies. Professor Stern's first book, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (University of Chicago Press, 1997) explores the politics of affect in post-revolutionary American fiction; nominated for the MLA's Best First Book Award, it received third place. In 2002, with Professor Christopher Castiglia of Loyola University , Chicago , she co-edited a special edition of Early American Literature on the topic of "Early American Interiority." Her essays on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and 17th-, 18th-. and 19th-century American women's writing have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, American Literature, The Arizona Quarterly, ESQ, LEGACY, and in collections such as Passing and The Fictions of Identity; Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century's Ends; and Mortal Remains: Explaining Death in Early America, among others (see below for complete list of publications). Her study of Mary Chesnut's revised Civil War journals, "Mary Chesnut's Unfinished Epic," is under contract at the University of Chicago Press . A third book-length project, "Life on the Food Chain: Appetite, Affect, and American Autobiography, 1845- 1880" is in progress. Winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Newberry Library in 1994-5 (declined), and a fellowship at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities in 1995, Professor Stern has received the Associated Student Government's Mortar Board Award for Teaching (1992-1993); The Panhellenic Association Teaching Recognition Award (1999); and The Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award (2001). She was elected to the editorial board of Early American Literature in 2004. Professor Stern will edit the Norton Critical Edition of The Coquette, slated for publication in 2009.

Publications by Julia Stern

The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Hardback)

The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Paperback)

"I Am Cruel Hungry: Dramas of Twisted Appetite and Rejected Identification in The Morgesons," Knowledge of the Gap: American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard ed. Rob Smith and Ellen Weinaur (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2003): 107-127.

Co-edited with Professor Christopher Castiglia, Special Edition of Early American Literature 37.1 (Spring: 2002) on the topic of "Early American Interiority."
"Introductory Essay: Early American Interiors," co-written with Christopher Castiglia, Early American Literature 37.1 (Spring, 2002): 1-7.

"The Politics of Tears: Representations of Death in the Early American Novel, 1789-1799," Mortal Remains: Explaining Death in Early America , ed. Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 108-119.

"The State of 'Women' in Ormond; or, Patricide in the New Nation," Revising Charles Brockden Brown , ed. Philip Barnard, Mark Kamruth, and Stephen Shapiro ( Nashville : University of Tennessee Press , forthcoming 2004.

"Live Burial and Its Discontents: Mourning Becomes Melancholia in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," in Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century's End , ed. Peter Homans ( Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press , 2000): 62-82.

"To Relish and To Spew: Disgust As Cultural Critique in The Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight," in LEGACY: A Journal of American Women Writers 14.1 (Spring 1997): 1-12.

"Spanish Masquerade and the Drama of Racial Identity in Uncle Tom's Cabin," in Passing and The Fictions of Identity , ed. Elaine Ginsberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996): 103-130.

"Excavating Genre in Our Nig," American Literature 67.3 (September, 1995): 439-466.

"Double Talk: The Rhetoric of the Whisper in Poe's `William Wilson,'" ESQ 40.3 (1994): 185-218.

"Working Through The Frame: Charlotte Temple and The Poetics of Maternal Melancholia," Arizona Quarterly 49.4 (Winter, 1993): 1-32..

"To Represent Afflicted Time: Mourning As Historiography," American Literary History 5.2 (Summer, 1993): 378-388.

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