E-mail address: nicholas.spengler@uab.cat
Department & University: Department of English and German Studies, UAB
Brief summary of research interests:
My research takes a transnational and transcultural approach to U.S. American literary and cultural studies. I wrote my PhD dissertation on Herman Melville’s representation of Spanish America, and I continue to be interested in how U.S. American literature takes us beyond the borders of the nation: through travel writing, maritime writing, and writing about migration and diaspora. Among my current research projects is a study of the experimental aesthetics of war refugee fiction across different periods of U.S. history, comparing Melville’s novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855) with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015).
Selected publications:
- Melville’s Americas: Hemispheric Sympathies, Transatlantic Contagion. Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.
- “Melville and American Solitude: A Settler-Colonial Poetics”. The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville, eds. Jennifer Greiman and Michael Jonik. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
- “Sketches of Spain: The Traveling Fictions of Frances Calderón de la Barca’s The Attaché in Madrid”. Spain, the United States, and Transatlantic Literary Culture throughout the Nineteenth Century, eds. John C. Havard and Ricardo Miguel Alfonso. Routledge, 2022. ISBN 9781032108407.
- “Of Squalls and Mutinies: Emergency Politics and Black Democracy in Moby-Dick and ‘The Heroic Slave’”. Textual Practice, “Rescaling Melville” special issue, 35.11 (2021). 1815-1834. DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2021.1968183.
- “The Poetics of Allegory and Enchantment in Melville’s Americas”. Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, “Melville and Spanish America” special issue, 23.3 (October 2021). 54-72. DOI: 10.1353/lvn.2021.0033.
- “Tracking Melville’s ‘Dog-King’: Creole Sympathies and Canine Warfare in the Americas”. Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 21.3 (October 2019). 71-93. DOI: 10.1353/lvn.2019.0033