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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Falkoff, Marc D. "Heads and Tales: American Letters in the Age of Phrenology," History Department, Brandeis University, April 1997.
This work is an examination of nineteenth-century American literature in the context of phrenology, the reigning psychology of the antebellum era. By examining a wide range of texts and authors—including Emerson’s essays, Poe’s stories, Hawthorne’s novels, Whitman’s poetry, and Fanny Fern’s newspaper columns—alongside the technical and popular pamphlets of this contested science, my study sketches out a series of complex literature reactions to phrenology. In particular, it argues that phrenology—with its doctrine that character and intelligence were legible from the shape of one’s head—should be considered the premier example of panoptic technology, breeding self-discipline, self-normalization, and anxiety in antebellum American culture. Phrenology was a science which American writers found impossible to ignore. By bringing to light the unexpected ways in which they wrestled with the implications of the science, this dissertation thereby makes visible a phrenological pattern of thought in the era’s literature.
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