Stephen Arch

 Stephen Arch is the author of two books: Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth-Century New England and After Franklin: The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-Revolutionary America, 1780–1830. His scholarly articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, The William and Mary Quarterly, and elsewhere. In 2015, he published a critical textual edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1838 novel, Homeward Bound (New York: AMS Press). He will published a second critical edition of a Cooper novel, Home as Found, in 2021. He serves as Associate Lead Editor of The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper.

Arch’s current research interests include gothic literature, scholarly editing, and the literature of sports. He is co-editing a collection of essays on teaching Cooper’s novels (for the Modern Language Association), and will soon begin editing Edith Wharton’s short stories for the Oxford edition of the complete works of Edith Wharton. He served as Department chair from 2007-2012, and as associate chair from 1998-2003 and in 2006. He was a Fulbright scholar in the Netherlands in 1996.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

Home as Found, by James Fenimore Cooper, The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (anticipated publication date of 2021), an MLA/CSE approved edition with complete scholarly apparatus

“Benjamin Franklin: Printer, Writer, Editor,” in The Blackwell Companion to American Literature, ed. Susan Belasco Smith, Theresa Strouth Gaul, Linck Johnson, and Michael Soto (New York: Wiley), forthcoming

“E. L. Doctorow,” in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Patrick O’Donnell (New York: Wiley), forthcoming

“‘The Dark Horrors of Consciousness’: Doctorow and the Gothic,” in E. L. Doctorow: A Reconsideration, ed. Michael Wutz and Julian Murphet (Edinburgh U P, 2020), 53 – 72

“Suffering and Transcendence in Literary Sports Writing,” in Sport in Society 22.5 (2019) https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2018.1430479

“Seeing Gothicly: Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons,” in Haunted Realities: The Naturalist Gothic in American Literature, ed. Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden (U of Alabama Press, 2017), 17 – 30

Courses Taught

ENG 129 Introduction to Reading Poetry
IAH 207 Literature, Culture, Society [gothic literature]
ENG 210 Introduction to English
ENG 314 Readings in American Literatures
ENG 316 Readings in Irish Literature
ENG 320C Methodologies of Literary History
ENG 364 Studies in 18th/19th Century Literature
ENG 443 Seminar in 19th Century American Literature
ENG 484 Critical Questions in Literary Schools or Movements
ENG 826 Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing