Faculty Leaders

Gavin Jones

professor and chair of English

Gavin Jones teaches courses on nineteenth and twentieth century American literature.  He is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (University of California Press, 1999) and American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2008), and the editor of a recent scholarly edition of Sylvester Judd's neglected "transcendental" novel, Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom (1845).

He has published articles on George W. Cable, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. DuBois, Sylvester Judd, Paule Marshall, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville, in journals such as American Literary History, New England Quarterly, and African American Review. He is currently completing a book about American literature's obsessive efforts to describe and theorize the experience of failure.