Robert Cantwell, Townsend Ludington Professor of American Studies

Contact Information

Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
rcantwel@email.unc.edu

Education

Ph.D., English, University of Iowa, 1971
M.A., English, University of Chicago, 1968
B.A., Grinnell College, 1966

Synopsis

Robert Cantwell, Townsend Ludington Professor of American Studies, joined the UNC faculty in 1993.  Among his current courses are Anti-Fifties: The Making of a Counter-Decade; American Life and the Jewish Writer; and, in the English Department, Creative Reading, a course in close literary analysis, and The American Novel. He has published Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (University of Illinois Press, 1984); Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1993); When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard University Press, 1996); and If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2009), an essay collection, and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Bluegrass Breakdown. At present he is working on a book on sexual politics. 

Courses

Newly Developed:

In American Studies: American Life and the Jewish Writer. Fall, 2007, 2008.
In English: Creative Reading (seminar) Spring 2008, 2009.
In Folklore: Folklore Theory (graduate seminar), Fall 2009.

Lecture/Discussion:

Approaches to American Studies
Anti-Fifties: Voices of a Counter-Decade
The Folk Revival
The American Novel

Back to the Future: Chicago, 1871-1967
Images of the American Landscape.

Graduate Seminars:

Folklore and Human Rights
Jane Addams’ Books
The Minstrel Show
Borderlands