Andy Doolen | University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences

Andy Doolen

Professor, Literature & Film Division, Department of English

Andy Doolen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Kentucky and a leading scholar of U.S. literature, culture, and empire. He is the author of Territories of Empire: U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence (Oxford, 2014) and Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (Minnesota, 2005), works that helped establish a new school of scholarship on the cultures of empire in the early United States. His essays and reviews have appeared in American Literature, Journal of American History, Early American Literature, American Literary History, and Studies in American Fiction, among other journals and edited collections. His forthcoming book, Traitor: The Life and Assassination of John Dunn Hunter, American Radical, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in December 2025.

Contact Information

andy.doolen@uky.edu

1251 Patterson Office Tower

Education

Ph.D. University of Arizona (2001)
MA, English, The University of Rhode Island (1995)
BA, English, The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (1991)

Research Interests

African American Literature
North American studies
Native American and Indiegnous Studies
18th and 19th Century American Literature and Culture
Biography

Affiliations

English

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Office Hours

Fall 2025: 12:30-1:50. Kindly schedule an appointment by email.

Selected Publications

Selected Publications:

Books:

Traitor: The Life and Assassination of John Dunn Hunter, American Radical (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 2025)

Territories of Empire: U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence (Oxford University Press, 2014.)

Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2005)

Articles & Book Chapters:

“Claiming Native Space: John Dunn Hunter and the Fredonian Rebellion,” Early American Literature 53.3 (2018): 685-713.

“Autobiography across Borders: Reading John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America, from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen,” In Inventing Destiny: Cultural Explorations of US Expansion, University of Kansas Press

"Charles Brockden Brown, Empire, and Colonialism," In The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford University Press)

“When Mammy Lies: The Everyday Resistance of Slave Women in Martin Delany’s Blake,” Studies in American Fiction 45.1 (Spring 2018): 1-17.

"Captives in Mexico: Zebulon Pike and the New American Regionalism," In Bordering Establishments: Mapping Regions in Early American Writing (University of Georgia Press, 2015)

"Women Writers and the Early U.S. Novel," In The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature, Ed. Dale M. Bauer. Cambridge University Press, 2012: 119-139.

“ 'Be Cautious of the Word Rebel’: Race, Transnationalism, and the Struggle for History in Martin Delany’s Blake; Or, the Huts of America,” American Literature 81 (March 2009): 153-179.

“Blood, Republicanism, and the Return of George Washington: A Response to Shirley Samuels,” American Literary History 20.1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 76-82.

“Early American Civics and Rehistoricizing the Power of Republicanism,” American Literary History 19.1 (Spring 2007): 120-140.

“Reading and Writing Terror: The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741,” American Literary History 16.3 (August 2004): 377-406.

“Snug Stored Below’: The Politics of Race in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers,” Studies in American Fiction 29.2 (Autumn 2001): 131-158.