Joan Shelley Rubin
Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
365 Rush Rhees Library
Rochester, New York 14627-0070
joru@mail.rochester.edu
phone: 585.275.9347
fax: 585.756.4425
Ph.D., Yale University, 1974
Courses Offered
(subject to change)
Spring 2009
HIS 334W/434: U.S. Colloquium II
Fall 2009
HIS 500: Problems in Historical Analysis
Spring 2010
HIS 169: The Transatlantic Twenties
HIS 252: Cultural History of the United States, 1876-Present
Fields of Interest
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century American cultural and intellectual history.
Broadly speaking, I am concerned with the values, assumptions, and anxieties that have shaped American life, as reflected in both high culture and the experiences of ordinary people. In terms of my research, Harvard University Press recently published my new book entitled Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, for which I received a Guggenheim Fellowship. That work reflects my interests in the history of books and reading in the United States; fundamentally, it explores how readers made meaning in the past and how they encountered literature as lived experience. I am also co-editing a volume for a collaborative History of the Book in America (a project of the American Antiquarian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of North Carolina Press); my subject is the book since 1945, including the impact of electronic media. My present work is in part an outgrowth of my previous study of a neglected aspect of the literary scene in the interwar period: The Making of Middlebrow Culture. I see myself as having moved over the years from the practice of fairly traditional intellectual history (my first book was about an American writer and critic, Constance Rourke) to wider interests in popular culture. My teaching reflects that evolution as well.
Representative Publications:
- Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007).
- "The Scholar and the World: The Popularization of the Humanities in the Postwar Period," in David Hollinger, ed., The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)
- "The Genteel Tradition at Large," Raritan (Winter 2006).
- "What Is the History of the History of Books?," Journal of American History, (September 2003).
- "Modernism in Practice: Public Readings of the New Poetry," in Townsend Ludington, ed., A Modern Mosaic (2000).
- "The Boundaries of American Religious Publishing," Book History (1999).
- "Listen, My Children: Modes and Functions of Poetry Reading in American Schools, 1880-1950," in Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, eds., Moral Problems in American Life (1998).
- "'They Flash Upon That Inward Eye': Poetry Recitation and American Readers," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1997).
- "Between Culture and Consumption," in Richard W. Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture (1993).
- The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992).
- "A Convergence of Vision: Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler, and American Art," American Quarterly (1990).
- "Self, Culture, and Self-Culture in Modern America: The Early History of the Book-of-the Month Club," Journal of American History (1985).
- "Information, Please: Culture and Expertise in the Interwar Period," American Quarterly (1983).
- Constance Rourke and American Culture (1980).
