Joe Shapiro | Humanities and Social Sciences | SIU

Joe Shapiro received his Ph.D. from Stanford University (2011). He specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. literature.

Dr. Shapiro’s research focuses primarily on the representation of class in the U.S. novel. His book, The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2017), challenges the common sense according to which class conflict and working-class radicalism are foreign to early U.S. literary history. It does so by delivering sustained close readings of novels by Charles Brocken Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe that connect these novels to labor history. (A related essay, “White Slaves in the Late-Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Imagination,” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature [2016].)

Dr. Shapiro is currently at work on his second book project, tentatively entitled Radicalism and the U.S. Novel in the Long Gilded Age. This book will investigate the relationship between the U.S. novel and working-class radicalism from the mid-1880s to World War I, and it will offer readings of long-neglected works such as Edwin Arnold Brenholtz’s The Recording Angel, James Oppenheim’s The Nine-Tenths and George Allan England’s The Air-Trust.

In addition to teaching courses on nineteenth-century U.S. literature, Dr. Shapiro teaches courses on literary theory, and he has recently begun to teach a course on Cli-Fi (i.e., climate change fiction).