Patricia Crain

Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book; American Antiquarian Society/National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship; Spencer Foundation Fellowship in the History of Education, Newberry Library; Gilder-Lehrman Institute Fellowship; McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, University of Minnesota

Patricia Crain’s teaching, research, and writing center on nineteenth-century American literature and culture, on the history of print culture and literacy, on the history of childhood, and on critical pedagogy. In The Story of A: the Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, 2000; MLA first book prize), she was interested in how elementary reading practices socialized readers and shaped the literary narrative of the antebellum U.S. Her recent work explores the emergence of child readers as galvanizing cultural and literary figures in the nineteenth century, the genealogy of the key cultural concept “literacy” in the late nineteenth century, and the related (historical and current) moral panics concerning children and reading. Recent essays include “Spectral Literacy: The Case of Goody Two-Shoes” (in Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800), “New Histories of Literacy” (in The Blackwell Companion to Book History), and “Reading Childishly?: A Codicology of the Modern Self” (forthcoming) on the symbolic form of the codex. She teaches a variety of courses in nineteenth-century American literature, high and low, as well as in the history of books and reading. Recent graduate courses include The Nineteenth-Century American Tale and Readers and Reading in Early America.