How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
I had wonderful American literature professors when I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis—Daniel Shea, Richard Ruland, Wayne Fields, Robert Milder—and my interest emerged in their classes. Shea was the earliest of them, historically speaking, and I remember being introduced to Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards, among others, in his classes. I stayed on to get a master’s degree, in the Literature and History Program, and one of the program’s visiting speakers was the late Sacvan Bercovitch; he inspired me to apply to the Ph.D. program at Columbia University, where he was eventually my dissertation director.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
Anything by Charles Brockden Brown—right now I’m teaching Arthur Mervyn, or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799, 1800), which is challenging but rewarding. And lately I’ve been regularly teaching the so-called “Reynolds pamphlet,” Alexander Hamilton’s 1797 text in which he tried to defend himself against charges of financial corruption by confessing to an extramarital “amour” with a married woman, Maria Reynolds. Many students have seen Lin Manuel-Miranda’s “Hamilton” (or listened to the music), and they like to try to figure out what really happened in this murky episode. The document itself is a fascinating hybrid—a polemical defense by Hamilton followed by a dossier of letters received from Maria and her husband James as well as letters Hamilton exchanged with the congressional investigators and others.
What are you currently working on?
I’m finishing up the essay on Michael Wigglesworth’s 1653-57 diary, which Edmund S. Morgan edited and published in 1951. My essay is entitled “Wigglesworth’s Queer Orthography,” because in the diary he used a particular shorthand code to encrypt the entries in which he discussed what he believed to be his excessive fondness for his (male) students, his “unnatural filthy lust,” and the “pollution [that] escaped [him] in [his] sleep” as a consequence of “filthy dreams.” My aim is to turn the diary to advantage for the early history of queer sexuality. I’m also in the early stages of preparing an edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s underappreciated novel Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1799-1800) for the Q19 series I edit for the University of Pennsylvania Press. If all goes according to plan the volume will also include Brown’s feminist dialogue, Alcuin (1798).
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
I don’t seem to find time to read much outside my field, but I did recently re-read Jamie O’Neill’s novel, At Swim, Two Boys (2001), a gorgeous historical novel about the love between two young Irish men, Doyler and Jim, set amid the political turmoil in Ireland in 1915-16. The writing is insanely beautiful, the story is moving and heart-breaking, and the way queer love intersects with Irish political struggles is fascinating.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
There are a great many! I am lucky to have been able to work with so many talented graduate students over the years, some of whom have been SEA Junior Scholars of the Month in recent times (Daniel Diez Couch, Sam Sommers). And I am very fortunate to work in a department at UCLA that has numerous wonderful early Americanists—Michael Colacurcio, Karen Rowe (emerita), Michael Cohen, Carrie Hyde, Cristobal Silva (SEA Scholar of the Month, Dec. 2018), and Alex Mazzaferro (Junior Scholar of the Month, Aug. 2018). I would single out Alex if only because he is the newest to join us at UCLA. His work on the “innovation prohibition”—the idea in the early modern period that (contrary to our present-day celebration of innovation) newness was suspect, dangerous, and by default equated with revolution—is remarkable, and the fact that he pursues this topic in so many different places in the seventeenth century (transatlantically, hemispherically) is impressive. He exemplifies, to me, the amazing new generation of early Americanists who are remaking the field.
Christopher Looby is Professor of English, UCLA; Co-director, Americanist Research Colloquium; Director, English in Florence Summer Travel Study Program.