Stuart Burrows
Associate Professor of English:
English
Phone: +1 401 863 3621
Stuart_Burrows@Brown.EDU
My scholarly interests include the nineteenth and twentieth century American novel, the relationship between literature and the visual arts, the history of photography, film, modernism, and rhetoric.
Biography
Stuart Burrows received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2001, and joined the Department of English at Brown University that year. He is the author of "A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography," (Georgia, 2008) and essays in Nineteenth Century Literature, The Arizona Quarterly, NOVEL, The Henry James Review, and a variety of edited collections.
Interests
My first book, "A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography," examined how the invention of the camera transformed the way American writers conceived of the limits and purpose of representation. Arguing for the centrality of photography to a set of writers commonly thought of as hostile to the camera—including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein—my book traced the photographic metaphors and allusions to the medium which appear throughout these writers' work. My essays have explored topics such as narrative identification in the novels of Raymond Chandler, servants in the work of Henry James, national identity in Willa Cather's "The Professor's House," the anti-photographic aesthetic of James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," and desire in Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice."
I am currently working on a book titled "The Third Person: American Fiction in the Age of Illeism," which argues that modern identity takes place in the third person, a development I trace back to the emergence of the naturalist novel in the late nineteenth century. Other current projects include a book on the work of Thomas Pynchon, and essays on the relationship between faith and narrative in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, spectatorship in Michael Winterbottom's "Wonderland," the role of confession in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the use of allusion in Herman Melville's "Billy Budd."
Degrees
Ph.D. Princeton University, 2001, M.A. Northeastern University, 1995, B.A. University of Southampton, 1989
Awards
Robert Gayle Noyes Assistant Professorship in the Humanities, Brown University, 2004-2008
Bronson Research Fellowship, Brown University, 2003
Leon Edel International Prize, Henry James Review, 2000
Affiliations
Modern Language Association (MLA)
Modernist Studies Association (MSA)
American Comparative Literature Association
C19: The Society of Nineteenth Century Americanists
Henry James Society
Funded Research
2003
Bronson Research Fellowship, Brown University
Curriculum Vitae
