Michelle Sizemore
- Associate Professor
- American Studies
- English
- Social Theory
- Colonial Through Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture
- Literary Theory
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin; B.A., University of Kentucky
Additional Areas of Interest:
- Political Theory
- Time Studies
- Affect Studies
- Literature and Para-Religion
- Literature and Science
Book Description:
AMERICAN ENCHANTMENT: Rituals of the People in the Postrevolutionary World
American Enchantment argues that “enchantment" becomes a vital mode of enacting the people after the demise of traditional monarchical forms. My book investigates this phenomenon throughout a wide range of social and political rituals and literary and cultural discourses. In works by Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—as well as in Delaware oral histories, accounts of George Washington’s inauguration, Erasmus Darwin’s medical studies, and Methodist conversion narratives—enchantment is an experience uniquely capable of producing new forms of popular power and social affiliation. Recognizing the role of enchantment in constituting the people overturns some of our most common-sense assumptions: above all, the people are not simply a flesh-and-blood substance but also a quasi-mystical force.
Forthcoming with Oxford University Press in November 2017.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/american-enchantment-97801906275...
Articles
"Scrupulous Sincerity." Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 34.1 (June 2017): 183-193.
“ ‘Changing by Enchantment’: Temporal Convergence and Early National Comparisons in Washington Irving’s Sketchbook.” Studies in American Fiction. 40.2 (2013): 157-180.
“When are the People?: Temporality, Popular Sovereignty, and the U.S. Settler State.” South Central Review Special Issue on U.S. Imperialism. 30.1(2013): 3-31.
Book Chapters
“Time and the Literary Archive." Forthcoming in Cambridge Critical Concepts: Time and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Reviews
The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715-1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic, Jean-FranÇois-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny. Edited by Gordon Sayre and Carla Zecher. Translated by Gordon Sayre. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Early American Literature.50.1 (January 2015).
- Associate Professor
- American Studies
- English
- Social Theory
