I’m a faculty member in NYU’s Department of English, where I’ve taught undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature and culture since 2001. My work focuses on two broad areas: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, and New York City writing from the Dutch colonial period to the present. My training, scholarship, and teaching are interdisciplinary; I received my Ph.D. from Boston University in American Studies and describe myself as a cultural historian of writing. As a result, my literary history courses tend to double as cultural history courses. In them I direct a significant amount of attention to issues of method and discipline, including questions about the status of literary texts and interpretation as categories of historical evidence.

I will be on research leave for the fall 2008 semester, though I will continue in my position as Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Residential College at Broome Street. In spring 2009 I will teach a graduate seminar on literatures of the Black Atlantic through 1855 and, with my colleague Cyrus Patell, our regular undergraduate lecture, “Writing New York,” which covers the late eighteenth century to the 1990s.

This site exists primarily to archive information about my teaching, research, and professional writing. I blog about New York literature, culture, and history at A History of New York and about miscellaneous topics at The Great Whatsit (though I’m currently on hiatus at the latter). I’m on the editorial board of common-place, an online quarterly magazine about early American culture.

Contact information:

Bryan Waterman
Associate Professor
Department of English
New York University
13-19 University Place, room 538
New York, NY 10003
212/998-8819
bryan.waterman@nyu.edu