Department of English

John Burt

Department Chair
Paul E. Prosswimmer Professor of American Literature
PhD, Yale University
Meet Professor Burt through OpenBook: An English Department Podcast.

Pronouns: he/him/his

Research Interests

19th-century American literature, 20th-century American literature (especially poetry), Southern Gothic fiction, American romantic fiction, composition, rhetoric.

Selected Publications

• "Political Violence and the Persuasive Engagement in Frederick Douglass," Literary Imagination, Volume 23, Issue 2, July 2021, 111-136.
• "Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism." Harvard University Press, 2013
• "Victory." Turning Point Press, 2007
• "Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren." Editor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2002
• "The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren." Editor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1998.
• "Work Without Hope." Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
• "Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism." New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
• "The Way Down." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
• Articles and poetry in ELH, Yale Review, Poetry Miscellany, Chicago Review, Shenandoah, and other journals.

Selected Awards

• Prize Americana, 2024
• Fellowship, Newhouse Humanities Center at Wellesley College, 2006-07
• Guggenhein Fellowship, 1997
• ACLS Fellowship, 1997

Selected Courses Taught

• American Gothic & American Romance (ENG 177a)
• Fiction of the American South (ENG 207b)
• American Realism & Naturalism (ENG 126a)

• Romanticism II: Byron, Shelley & Keats (ENG 125b)