Glenn Hendler

Glenn Hendler received a B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Theory from Northwestern University. Before joining the faculty at Fordham University in New York City, he taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, which explores “the logic of sympathy” in fiction by Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, T.S. Arthur, Martin Delany, Horatio Alger, Fanny Fern, Nathanial Parker Willis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells.

He has co-edited three books: Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (with Mary Chapman); an edition of Walt Whitman’s temperance novel Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (with Christopher Castiglia) and Keywords for American Cultural Studies (with Bruce Burgett), which also has an online component called The Keywords Collaboratory. He is currently working (with Burgett) on a revised and expanded second edition of Keywords as well as a book exploring the representation of emotion and collective public violence to be called Riot Acts: Writing Public Violence in Nineteenth-Century America. Part of that project, titled “Feeling Like a State: Writing the 1863 New York City Draft Riots,” is forthcoming in an essay collection edited by Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson.

Glenn is currently chairing the English Department at Fordham, where he has also directed the American Studies program. He has also recently spent several years as the book review editor of American Quarterly.