Christopher Hanlon

Chris Hanlon is Professor of U.S. literature at the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University's New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. His writings on antebellum literature and culture focus on patterns of transatlantic kinship; slavery; sectional politics; communications technology and literature; eloquence; and disability and neurodiversity.

His first book, America's England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), traces the ways northern and southern partisans–making speeches, keeping journals, writing novels and poems, and otherwise addressing their fellow citizens during the decades prior to the Civil War–attempted to codify sectional antipathies in terms of imagined relations with English literature, culture, and history. His second book, Emerson's Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a reading of Emerson’s late work–and through that lens, his earlier essays as well–in light of Emerson’s failing memory in late life. Currently, he is the editor of the forthhcoming Oxford Handbook to Ralph Waldo Emerson, which will be the most expansive collection of critical essays on Emerson ever published. With Andrew Taylor (University of Edinburgh) and Sarah Ruffing Robbins (Texas Christian University), he co-edits the Edinburgh UP book series Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture.

Hanlon's critical essays have appeared in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, American Literature, American Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, New Literary History, Pedagogy, College Literature, Exquisite Corpse, Jouvert, Common-place, and J19 as well as several collections; he teaches courses in American and transatlantic literature of the 19th century, New England literature, editing, criticism, and other areas of literary studies.