Sean McCann English Department Wesleyan University Middletown, CT 06459-0100 (860) 685-3596 (860) 685-2361 fax smccann@wesleyan.edu EDUCATION 1993 Ph.D. in English, The Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York 1984 B.A. Georgetown University, cum laude PUBLICATIONS Books A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government, Princeton Univ. Press, 2008 Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism, Duke University Press, 2000 Edited Journal Issue Countercultural Capital: Essays on the Literature of the Sixties, Yale Journal of Criticism, special issue, coedited with Michael Szalay 18.2 (Winter 2005), 209-468, including two essays co-written with Michael Szalay: Introduction, Paul Potter and the Cultural Turn, 209-21, and Afterward Do You Believe in Magic: Literary Thinking after the New Left, 435-68. Essay and Articles My Ghost Life : Russell Banks and the Limits of Aesthtic Democracy, After the Program Era, ed. Loren Glass (University of Iowa Press), forthcoming Structures of Feeling (review essay on Aaron Rizenbeg, The Sentimental Touch: the Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialsim and Jennifer A. Williamson Twentieth-Century Semtimentalism), American Literary History, 27.2 (2015), 321-330. A Promissory Note with a Trick Clause : Legend, History, and Lynch Law in Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner and History, ed. Jay Waton (University of Mississippi Press), forthcoming, 2015 Investing in Persons :, The Political Culture of Growth Liberalism, The Cambridge Companion to JFK, ed Andrew Hoberek (Cambridge Univ. Press), 2015. Nice Believing : Mystery and Mysteries in Light in August, Faulkner and Mystery, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (University of Mississippi Press), 2014.
Does Anse Bundren Love His Wife: Gifts, Promises, and Obligations in As I Lay Dying, Approaches to Teaching As I Lay Dying, ed. Patrick S. O Donnell and Lynda Zwinger (MLA Press, 2011) Human, Not So Human: Some Quibbles About Moretti s Graphs, Maps, and Trees, Reading Graphs, Maps, and Trees :Responses to Franco Moretti, eds. Jonathan Goodwin and John Holbo, Glassbead Books, 2011. Down to the People : Pynchon and Schlesinger After the Imperial Presidency, Studies in American Fiction, 37.2 (Fall 2010) Eerie Serenity, co-written with Michael Szalay, Boundary 2 36:2 (2009), 145-53. Training and Vision: Roth, DeLillo, Banks, Peck and the Postmodern Aesthetics of Vocation, Twentieth-Century Literature 53.3 (2007), 298-326. Dark Passages: Jazz and Civil Liberty in the Postwar Crime Film, Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Black list Erat, eds. Frank Krutnik et al. (Rutgers University Press, 2007). Therapy for a Wounded Nation, The Common Review 4.3 (Winter 2006) The Hatchet and the Damage Done, The Common Review 3.3 (Fall 2004) The Cruelty of Zora Neale Hurston, The Common Review 2.3 (Fall 2003) The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Antiliberalism, ELH 67.1 (Spring 2000) Connecting Links : The Antiprogressivism of Sui Sin Far, Yale Journal of Criticism 12.1 (1999),73-88. The Ambiguous Politics of Politicizing, or De-Politicizing, the Aesthetic, Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom, ed. Amitava Kumar (St. Martin s Press, 1999), 39-70. Constructing Race Williams: The Klan and the Making of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction, American Quarterly 49.4 (1997), 677-716 Bonds of Brotherhood : Pauline Hopkins and the Work of Melodrama, ELH 64 (1997), 789-822. " Reintroduction of the Specialists : Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production, American Quarterly 49.1 (1997): 183-92. Why I'll Never Teach Rock 'n' Roll Again, Radical History Review 66 (1996), 191-202. A Roughneck Reaching for Higher Things : The Vagaries of Pulp Populism, Radical History Review 61 (1995): 4-34. Entries in Reference Works The Crime Novel, The Cambridge History of the American Novel, ed. Leonard Cassuto et al. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011) Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction, The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson (Cambridge Univ. Press), 2010. Raymond Chandler, A Companion to Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction, ed. David Seed (Wiley- Blackwell), 2009. Literature ; Dashiell Hammett, Encyclopedia of the Great Depression, ed. Robert S. McElvaine et al. (Cengage Gale, 2003) Works in Progress Found in the Street: New York City in tne 1940s and the Culture of the American Century, book ms in progress Naked Cities: The Literature of Urban Renewal, American Literature in the 1940s, ed. Chris Vials (Cambridge Univ. Press).
The Presidency, American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920, ed. Mark van Wienen, Cambridge Univ. Press Margaret Walker, John Williams and the Civil Rights Middlebrow, essay ms in progress SELECTED LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS A Theater and a Battleground : Professions of Childhood in 1940s New York, Harvard University, April 2014 Teaching The Poetry of Robert Frost, National Humanities Center online seminar, November 2013 Teaching Hemingay s In Our Time, National Humanities Center online seminar, December 2012 Teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald s The Great Gatsby, National Humanties Center online seminar, Feb 2013 Light and Air: Slum Clearance and Midcentury Modernism at The New Yorker, Post45 Conference, Fall 2011; Brown University, Spring 2013 My Ghost Life : Russell Banks and the Limits of Sympathy, Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, Spring 2011 Ordeals of Liberal Humanism: The Center for the Humanities and the Cold War University, Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, 50 th Anniversary Conference, invited lecture, 2009; Princeton University, Down to the People: Thomas Pynchon, Arthur Schleslinger, Jr., and the Imperial Presidency, Fordham University, invited lecture, 2008; Standford University, invited lecture, 2009; University of North Carolina, invited lecture, 2009 C. Wright Mills and the Cultural Apparatus, Modern Language Association, 2006 American Literature and Presidential Government, invited lecture, Columbia University American Studies Seminar, 2006 Walter Benn Michaels Argument, MLA conference, 2005 A Distaste for Blood : McCarthy, Lowell, Arendt and the Heroic Style, Modernist Studies Conference, 2005 His Position Takes the Imagination of the Country : American Literature and Presidential Government in, Harvard University, invited lecture, 2005; Columbia University, invited Lecture, 2005 Getting it Wrong : Roth, Banks, Peck, Modern Langauge Association, 2003 Respondent to panel on Working Noir, Modern Langauge Association, 2003 Bringing Home the War: Vietnam and the Politics of Representation, invited lecture, Yale University, Spring 2003, invited lecture Brandeis University, Fall 2003 Thomas Pynchon s Cold War: Gravity s Rainbow and the New Left, Univ. of California Irvine, invited lecture, 2002 Governable Beasts: Hurston, Roth and the New Deal, English Department, City University of New York Graduate Center, invited lecture; Boston College, invited lecture, 2001; Vanderbilt University, invited lecture Spring 2002 Achieving the Disembodied: Gertrude Stein as Saint of the Nation, Brown University English Dept. and Johns Hopkins University English Dept., invited lectures, Spring 2000 Constructing Race Williams: The Klan and the Making of American Crime Fiction, Lafayette College, invited lecture, March 1996 Respondent to Louis Menand, What is a University, Queens College, 1992 Respondent to Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, CUNY Grad Center, 1988
EMPLOYMENT 2007-present Professor, English, Wesleyan University 2000-2007 Associate Professor, English, Wesleyan University 1993-2000 Assistant Professor, English, Wesleyan University 1990-1992 Graduate Assistant, Queens College, CUNY 1987-1990 Adjunct Lecturer, Baruch College, CUNY Courses Taught at Wesleyan Aesthetics and/or Ideology American Crazy: Five Narratives of Violence, Extremism, and National Identity Literature, 1865-1945 American Literature and Culture of the 1950s American Modernism American Poetry The American Crime Story The Anti-Liberal Imagination Ethnic Fictions Faulkner and the Thirties The Great American Novel Introduction to the Study of Literature Literature and Social Criticism in the Progressive Era New York City in the 1940s The New Woman and the American Novel The New York Intellectuals Paris, London, Harlem: Metropolis, Modernity, and American Modernist Writing Paranoia and Invention: Don DeLillo and Post-War American Fiction Richard Wright and Co. The Social Imagination of the American Thirties The Vietnam Saga: Popular Culture and the American War in Vietnam SERVICE AT WESLEYAN Chair, English Department (2012-2015) Director, Center for Faculty Career Development (2008-2013) Member, Advisory Board, Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life (2012-13) Member, Advisory Board, Wasch Center for Retired Faculty (2008-2013) Member, Advisory Board, Center for Prison Education (2009-2011, 2013- ) Member, Committee on the Evaluation of Non-Traditional Scholarship (2010-2011) Member, Ad Hoc Budget Committee, Wesleyan University (2009-2010) Member, Ad Hoc Committee to Review Tenure and Promotion, Wesleyan University (2008-09) Director, Center for Faculty Career Development, Wesleyan University (2007-2012) Educational Policy Committee, Wesleyan University (2006-2008) Hiring Committee, English Department, Wesleyan University (2006, 2008) Honors Coordinator, English Department, Wesleyan University (2007-2010) Review and Appeals Board, Wesleyan University (2005-2007, 2013 - ) Advisory Board, Center for Faculty Career Development, Wesleyan University (2006-2007)
Director, American Studies, Wesleyan University (2003-2006) Advisory Board, Wesleyan Graduate Liberal Studies Program (2003-2007) Board of the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University (2002-2005) Advisory Committee on Tenure and Promotion, Wesleyan University (2002-2003) Advisory Board, Wesleyan University Press (2000-2005) Hiring Committee, American Studies Program, Wesleyan University (1999-2000) Board of Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University (1997-1999) Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, Wesleyan University (1998-99) Coordinator of English Dept. Colloquium, Wesleyan University (1998-2000) Benefits Review Committee, Wesleyan University (1998) Coordinator of English 201, English Dept, Wesleyan University (1996-1997, Fall 2000) Advisory Committee on Tenure and Promotion, Wesleyan University (1995-96) Hiring Committee, English Department, Wesleyan University (1995, 1997, 2006, 2008) NON-WESLEYAN SERVICE Editor, Post45 (http://post45.research.yale.edu) (2012 - _ Editorial Board, Post45 series, Stanford University Press (2010 - ) Member, Board of Editorial Consultants, Contemporary Literature (2013- _ Associate Editor, Contemporary Literature (2009-2011) NEH Fellowship Selection Panel (2011) Selection Committee, National Humanities Center (2010) Referee, American Literary History, Novel, American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Journal of Narrative Technique, Criticism, Clio; Univ. of Alabama Press, Cambridge Univ. Press, Columbia Univ. Press, Duke Univ. Press, Univ. of Georgia Press, Harvard University Press, University of Minnesota Press, Oxford Univ. Press, Polity Press, Princeton Univ. Press, Rutgers Univ. Press, Temple University Press External referee on tenure and promotion cases: University of Alabama; Boston University; SUNY Buffalo; UCLA; University of Connecticut; Hunter College, CUNY; University of Kentucky; University of Missouri; Fordham University Ph.D. dissertation examination external referee: CUNY Graduate Center, Brandeis University, Fordham University Member of External Review Committee, English and Comparative Literary Studies, Occidental College (2007) Member of External Review Committee, American Studies Program, Colby College (2005) HONORS AND AWARDS Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Wesleyan University, 2004 Honorable Mention, American Studies Asssociation John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Published Book in American Studies, 2001 ACLS Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, 2001-02 NEH Summer Seminar Fellowship, 1995 Faculty fellowship, Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, fall 1994, fall 1999 Helaine Newstead Dissertation Fellowship, CUNY Graduate Center, 1992-93 Graduate Assistant Fellowship, Queens College, 1990-92 University Fellowship, CUNY Graduate Center, 1988-1990 References available upon request.