JOHN FUNCHION

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in early American and nineteenth-century U.S. literature. Currently, I am completing my second book, Insurgent Fictions: Partisan Sovereignty and Nineteenth-Century U.S. War Culture. 

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My first book is Novel Nostalgias (Ohio State, 2015). With Edward Watts and Keri Holt, I co-edited a collection of essays, Mapping Region in Early American Writing (Georgia, 2015). My work has also appeared in ESQ, Modernist Cultures, MLQ, Early American Literature, and The Henry James Review. I have essays forthcoming in Democracies in America (eds. Laski and Emerson; Oxford, 2023) and the Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics (ed. Kerkering; Cambridge, 2025). With J. Michelle Coghlan, I co-edited a special issue of The Henry James Review on “The Radical Henry James” in 2023.

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I was the sole humanities researcher on a multi-disciplinary research team at the University of Miami and Indiana University that studied the form, content, and dissemination of conspiracy theories online. The National Science Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program (SaTC) awarded our team a $2,000,000 grant in 2021. Our team developed new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative forms, conspiratorial rhetoric, and network dissemination. We published eighteen articles that appeared in various high-impact social science, linguistics, communications, and science journals between 2021 and 2025 with the support of this grant. 

 

I received my Ph.D. in Literatures and Cultures in English from Brown University (2008), an M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota (2002), and a B.A. in English from Creighton University (2000).