Jennifer J. Baker

Associate Professor of English

Education

Ph.D. 2000 (English), University of Pennsylvania

Areas of Research/Interest

18th- and 19th-century American literature, culture, and intellectual history

External Affiliations

Board Member, Melville Society Cultural Project

Fellowships/Honors

Faculty Fellowship, New York University Center for the Humanities, 2014-15; Heyman Prize for outstanding publication by junior faculty member in the humanities, Yale University, 2004; Morse Fellowship, Yale University, 2005; Barra Postdoctoral Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 2001 (declined); Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, 1997-98; Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Research Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 1996.

 

Bio

Jennifer Baker specializes in American literature, culture, and intellectual history, with particular interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing. She is the author of Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Johns Hopkins UP), a study of eighteenth-century American writing in relation to the era’s financial history. Her other published work on early American culture includes essays on Benjamin Franklin, Cotton Mather, Judith Sargent Murray, and Revolutionary-era women writers; a co-edited special issue of Early American Literature on “Economics and Early American Literature”; and an essay on the treatment of Hamiltonian finance in the Broadway musical Hamilton.

 

She is currently at work on a study of Romantic cultures in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Her published work on nineteenth-century literature includes essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Martin R. Delany. In 2019, she co-organized “Melville’s Origins,” a global conference to commemorate the bicentennial of Herman Melville’s birth in Manhattan. She also serves on the Melville Society Cultural Project, which organizes archival research, visiting fellowships, programming, and lectures at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She was a lead faculty member at the 2018 NEH Summer Institute for K-12 Educators on “Teaching Melville,” and she will return to the institute again in 2020. At NYU, she teaches classes on American literature, transatlantic Romanticism, Herman Melville, literature and science, environmental literature, and a general humanities course on "Humans and the Natural World."

Publications

  • Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America
    Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005
  • “The Time to Rise: Imagining Black Maturation in Blake,” Studies in American Fiction 46:2 (Fall 2019).
  • “Money and its Interpretation: Paper Currency in Early America.” A Cultural History of Money in the Enlightenment, ed. Christine Desan (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
  • “Hamilton, Credit, and the American Enterprise.” Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, eds. Michelle Chiara and Matthew Seybold (New York: Routledge, 2018).
  • “Hawthorne’s Picturesque at Home and Abroad.” Studies in Romanticism 55:3 (Fall 2016): 417-444.
  • “Emerson, Embryology and Culture.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3:1. (April 2015).
  • “Science and Technology.” Emerson in Context, Wesley T. Mott, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
  • “Women’s Writing of the Revolutionary Era.” The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature. Dale Bauer, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
  • "Dead Bones and Honest Wonders: The Aesthetics of Natural Science in Moby-Dick." Melville and Aesthetics. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
  • "Judith Sargent Murray's Medium Between Calculation and Feeling." Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. Mary Carruth, ed. (Birmingham: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2006), 210-224. Reprint: Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (Gale, 2011).
  • "Paper Money Gets Personal." Common-place 6:3 (April 2006).
  • "Staging Revolution in Melville’s 'Benito Cereno': Babo, Figaro and the 'Play of the Barber.'" Prospects 26 (2001): 91-105.
  • "'It is uncertain where the Fates will carry me': Cotton Mather's Theology of Finance." Arizona Quarterly 56:4 (Winter 2000): 1-23.
  • "Benjamin Franklin and the Credibility of Personality." Early American Literature 35:3 (Fall 2000): 274-293. Reprinted in Benjamin Franklin (Critical Insights), ed. Jack Lynch (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2009).