Joy Kasson, Professor of American Studies and English

Contact Information

Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
(919) 962-4063
jskasson@email.unc.edu

Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 1972
B.A., Radcliffe College, 1966

Areas of Research

American literature, art, and culture
American studies
Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Research at a Glance

Sentimentalism in American literature and art
Buffalo Bill's Wild West and American popular culture
Representations of women in American literature and art

My work investigates the intersection of American literature, visual studies, and cultural history. My most recent publication, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), examines popular culture, its texts and images, at the turn of the twentieth century. It explores issues relating to national memory and the blurring of the boundaries between entertainment and history.

Previously, I have written on nineteenth-century visual culture and issues of family and gender (Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture, Yale, 1990) and on the friendships between American painters and writers in the first half of the nineteenth century (Artistic Voyagers: Europe and the American Imagination in the Works of Irving, Allston, Cole, Cooper, and Hawthorne, Greenwood, 1982). My undergraduate teaching includes courses on American culture in the era of ragtime, introductory courses in American studies, and courses on American art and culture. Graduate courses include studies of sentimental culture, the visual arts in American culture, and American memory. I have also worked as a consultant with secondary schools in the field of American Studies.