Mark Whalan

Mark Whalan profile picture
  • Title: Professor
  • Additional Title: Horn Endowed Professor
  • Phone: 541-346-3926
  • Office: 207 PLC
  • Office Hours: Winter term: T 2:15-3:15; F 1-3
  • Curriculum Vitae

Statement

 

Dr. Mark Whalan joined the University of Oregon as the Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English in 2011, after beginning his career at the University of Exeter in the UK. He specializes in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and has published four books: The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 (University of Tennessee Press 2006); Race, Manhood and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (University of Tennessee Press 2007); The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (University Press of Florida, 2008; and American Culture in the 1910s (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of American Studies, and has published in African American Review, Modernism/Modernity, American Art, Studies in American Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Journal of American Studies. His current work examines the relations between American modernism, World War One, and the development of the federal state.

Publications

World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State

In this book, Mark Whalan argues that World War One's major impact on US culture was not the experience of combat trauma, but rather the effects of the expanded federal state bequeathed by US mobilization. Writers bristled at the state's new intrusions and coercions, but were also intrigued by its creation of new social ties and political identities. This excitement informed early American... Read more

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America

This book offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), and their development of unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism and rural decline.

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

This is the first book to explore the wide-ranging significance of World War One to the culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Reading authors such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the book argues that the war served as a crucial event conditioning African American cultural understandings of masculinity, memory, and nationality in the 1920s... Read more