Grad Organizations • Grad News • Conferences • Student Directory • English Department
Program: English Ph.D.
Began program in 1999
Area of Study: 19th and 20th Century American Literature and Culture
E-Mail: sean-scanlan@uiowa.edu
Living in 16 different states by the time I graduated from high school and spending nearly 3 years in Japan have profoundly influenced my understanding of home as both place and idea. Since my own notions of place and displacement have been tested so frequently, it may come as no surprise that my primary research interest is reading for place and homesickness in American literature and culture. My dissertation, "Narrating Nostalgia: Literary Homesickness and the Rise of Modern New York, 1809-1925," examines a change in the way nostalgia was used in canonical and popular literary narratives set in New York City, from the beginning of urbanization in the early nineteenth-century up to the Jazz Age. The crisis of American urbanization, a process exemplified by New York’s transformation from trading post to metropolis, was matched by a crisis of feeling. In my dissertation I argue that the primary feeling literary artists used to represent this crisis is nostalgia, a comparative feeling in which the past collides with the present--resulting in both identity reconfiguration and a range of psychosocial and socioeconomic responses and reflections. My goal is to show that nostalgia involves ethical decision-making and it is part of the identity-reconfiguring machinery of narrative.
Related to moving and movement, I am a bicycling enthusiast. I commute to school, tour, and race both road and cyclocross. As well, I am an advocate for safe riding and safe driving. Currently, I am at the beginning stages of writing a study of the popularity of bicycling during the early 20th century, when icons like Joe Dimaggio and Mary Pickford frequently attended six-day track races at Madison Square Garden. Indeed, cycling pervaded all areas of culture and literature for several decades. The consolidation of bicycle manufacturing processes enabled the rapid rise of the automobile. As well, the bicycle played an important role in the transformation of women’s fashion and equality. And in the competitive sport of track racing, I consider two turn-of-the-century champions: African American World Champion Marshall "Major" Taylor and Arthur A. Zimmerman. Many novels and journals were devoted to the freedoms and dangers of cycling as an escape from parental supervision and as a means of transportation to new workplaces. In many ways, bicycling informs and structures the categories of modernity and modernism.
My interests and teaching philosophy are woven into a class I taught last year titled: The Rhetoric of the City: Urban and Suburban. This class was modeled on both fieldwork and literature courses. We walked our mid-sized city, Iowa City, in order to identify what our history and literary texts had first shown us. We engaged with the environment as a primary text. We began with the key questions: what type of city is Iowa City? And, what is the future of the suburban city in the U.S.? We then built a toolbox of practices and theories in order to help us analyze new information. The literary critic Hana Wirth-Nesher provided us with the idea of four environments, an idea that helped us to categorize and compare different sensory data: the human, the built, the natural, and the verbal environments. These environments always overlap and this taught us that the city is not easily controlled or defined. The literature and films that we examined helped us to engage with the history of urban and suburban forms and feelings, and our walks helped us to realize a multi-dimensional context. We also interviewed city residents who gave personal perspectives that we then used to question the expert opinions and theories of the written work that we encountered. Each interaction with the actual city forced students to see themselves as inseparable from the small city in which they lived. Our fieldwork enabled students and residents to rethink their positions and change their opinions about where they live and what effects their living environment has on their identity right now. Students usually see town residents as invisible or simply as a support network for them. Similarly, residents see the students as a faceless flow of young adults who pass through their city. Our class helped students and residents see that divisions between their groups are learned--and so new learning can assert a more ethical relation between groups who rely upon each other. Armed with new knowledge, students brought much more confidence a nd insight to the important themes of displacement, exile, and homelessness that we examined in the literature and in the city. One result was that the dynamics of class discussion changed from an insulated look at urban history, to a much more risky engagement with our actual environment. We learned that both urban history and the meaning of Iowa City are in some ways like living organisms. They are in constant movement; they are not settled.