Randall Fuller
- Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature
- Director of Graduate Studies
Contact Info
Personal Links
Biography —
I grew up in a small Missouri town and migrated to New York to work in publishing before entering graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. I came to KU as the inaugural Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature in 2017.
Research —
The thing I am most interested in is the way clusters of people come together to make meaning and shape their world through language and ideas. I have written about Civil War soldiers reading Emerson; about Thoreau and his fellow abolitionists grappling with Darwinian theory; and about an often-overlooked group of women who shaped transcendentalist thought far more than is generally acknowledged. I am currently at work on two projects. The first is an account of Henry James’s turn to theatre in the 1890s, and the second is a reconstructive biography of a young woman in Concord who drowned herself when her transcendentalist beliefs met the harsh realities of the New England class system. I teach and write about Nineteenth-Century U. S. Literature and Culture; Transcendentalism; Science and Literature; Women’s Literature; Novel Theory; Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Theater.
Selected Publications —
Books
Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism, Oxford University Press, 2025.
Reviewed in New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, The American Scholar, CHOICE, Open Letters, and others.
The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation, Viking Press, January 2017.
Reviewed in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Science, Nature, Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Journal of Books, Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, The Humanist, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and others.
From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Reviewed in American Literary History, Journal of American Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Journal of American History, New England Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Civil War History, Social History, The Boston Globe, Christianity & Literature, Library Journal, The Weekly Standard, and others.
The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks, co-edited with Robert Milder, Ohio State University Press, 2009.
Reviewed in Nineteenth-Century Literature, NBOL-19.
Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists, Oxford University Press, 2007; paperback, 2010.
Reviewed in New England Quarterly, Studies in the Novel.
Essays and Book Chapters
“Lydia Emerson,” Oxford Handbook of Emerson June 2024.
“The Second Act of Louis Bromfield,” Humanities, Spring 2021, vol. 42, issue 2.
“Reviving Zenobia: The Last Days and Forgotten Life of Martha E. Hunt,
Transcendentalist,” The New England Quarterly 93 (2), 161-187, 2020.
“The Poetics of Civil War Sacrifice,” Sacrifice and War Literature, ed. Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Shramm, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017.
“The ‘American Renaissance’ After the Civil War,” Cambridge History of American Civil War Literature, ed. Coleman Hutchison, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2015.
“Critics: 1945-2012,” in Emerson in Context, ed. Wesley T. Mott, Cambridge University Press, December 2013.
“Hawthorne and War,” New England Quarterly, December 2007.
“Politics, Aesthetics, Homosexuality: F. O. Matthiessen and the Tragedy of the American Scholar,” June 2007, American Literature.
“Errand into the Wilderness: Perry Miller as American Scholar,” American Literary History 18 (Spring 2006), pp.102-128.
“Teaching Don DeLillo’s White Noise,” in MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Don DeLillo White Noise, ed. by Tim Engles and John N. Duvall (New York: MLA, 2006), pp 19-26.
“Emerson in the Gilded Age,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 45:2 (1999), pp. 97-129.
“Theaters of the American Revolution: The Valley Forge Cato and the Meschianza in Their Transcultural Contexts,” Early American Literature, 34:2 (1999), pp.126-46.
Awards & Honors —
2020-21 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship
2020-2021 Robert B. Silvers Grant for Works in Progress
2014-2015 Guggenheim Fellow
2014 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend
2011 Christian Gauss Book Award, Phi Beta Kappa
2007-08 Research Fellow, NEH.
1999 Richard Beale Davis Award for Best Article Published by Early American Literature (presented by the MLA Division of American Literature before 1800).
Selected Public Humanities
“‘A Man on Fire’ Review: Thomas Higginson’s Battle,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2025.
“‘American Bloods’ Review: All in the Family,” Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2024.
“On Great Fields: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Professor and Hero,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2023.
“‘The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley’ Review: A Poet’s Emancipation,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2023
“‘Winslow Homer’ Review: The Brush of Nature,” Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2022.
“‘The Transcendentalists and their World Review: Concord’s Second Revolution,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 5, 2021.
“The Failed Promise Review: The Mad King and the Lost Cause,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2021.
“‘The Saddest Words’ Review: Faulkner in Black and White,” Wall Street Journal, 28 August 2020.
“Death at the Edges of Empire: Learning to Honor the Dead,” Wall Street Journal, 22 March 2020.
“‘Spying on the South’: The Forever Cotton Kingdom,” Wall Street Journal, 21 May 2019.
“Rigging the Market,” Wall Street Journal, 19 July 2018.
“Five Best,” Wall Street Journal, 1 June 2018.
“Thoreau’s Debt to Darwin,” Nature 15 June 2017 (546), pp. 349-50.
“Rage Against the Machine,” Wall Street Journal, 28 June 2017.
“Thoreau at 200,” Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2017.
“American Philosophy Can Change Your Life,” Wall Street Journal, 8 October 2016.
“The Lesson of the Masters,” Wall Street Journal, 25 March 2016.
“Custer Agonistes,” Wall Street Journal, 22 November 2015.
“When Billy and Johnny Got Back,” Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2015.
“Nevermore Into the Breach,” Wall Street Journal, 26, December 2014.
“Life During Wartime,” lead book review, Wall Street Journal, 26 April 2014.
“Randall Fuller: Five Best Books Inspired by the Civil War,” Wall Street Journal, 8 March 2014.
“Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Humanities, March/April 2013, pp. 13-18
“The Image of a Writer,” Humanities, November/December 2012, pp. 14-18.
“Paralysis in Athens,” New York Times, A27, June 6, 2012.
“We Bled in the Corn,” Disunion column, New York Times, August 10, 2011.
“We Shall See What Stuff You Are Made,” Disunion column, New York Times, June 6, 2011.
“Daybreak Gray and Dim,” Humanities, January/February 2011, pp. 14-21.