Andrew Kopec, an associate professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, specializes in American literature to 1900. He is interested in the relations among literature, culture, and economy, especially as they provoke questions about identity in life under midcentury capitalism. His first book, Sink or Swim: Business and the Self in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, which is now under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, shows how midcentury writing directly engaged the era’s financial uncertainty, rather than retreated from it.
Kopec is in the early stages of a second study that addresses literary and cultural responses to early Republican “internal improvements” — canals, roads, and railroads. Focusing on literary writers and visual artists, canal commissioners and surveyors, this book sees infrastructure to extend a US empire forward in time and beyond the North American continent in space. A cultural history of the American urge to excavate, the book is inspired by scholarship that connects the nineteenth-century to a long era of New World imperialism. An essay from this project that focuses on Philip Freneau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing about the Erie Canal appears in American Literature: “War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure.”
Academia.edu profile – @AndrewJKopec – andrew.kopec@pfw.edu
andrew kopec 