Samuel Otter, Professor and English Department Chair
Office: 232 Wheeler
Phone: 510-642-2470
Email: sotter@berkeley.edu
Areas of Interest
American literatures to 1900; Herman Melville.Current Research
Literature in and about Philadelphia between the U. S. Constitution and the Civil War; Melville, form, and the "literary."Professional Statement
Samuel Otter has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close reading also can be deep and wide. He has published Melville’s Anatomies (1999), in which he analyzes Melville’s concern with how meanings, particularly racial meanings, have been invested in and abstracted from human bodies. He recently finished a book entitled Philadelphia Stories, in which he examines the narratives about race, character, manners, violence, and freedom that unfold across a range of texts written in and about Philadelphia between 1790 and 1860. In recent years, he has taught courses on "Transatlantic Literature," "Melville and Aesthetics," "The Mysteries of the City," and the works of Edgar Allan Poe.Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
Melville’s Anatomies. University of California Press, 1999.
Philadelphia Stories. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, co-edited with Robert S. Levine. North Carolina, 2008.
"Melville and Disability." Special issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 8.1 (March 1986), co-edited with David T. Mitchell.
"Frank Webb's Still Life: Rethinking Literature and Politics through The Garies and Their Friends." American Literary History 20.4 (Winter 1988).
"An Aesthetics in All Things." Representations 104 (Fall 2008).
"How Clarel Works." In A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. Wyn Kelley (Blackwell, 2006).
"'An Almost Incredible Book': Fiction and Fact in Melville's Typee." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 51.1-3 (2005).
Office Hours
Please e-mail for appointment.
