Patricia Crain

Professor of English

Education

Ph.D. 1996 (English and Comparative Literature), Columbia University, M.Phil. 1991, M.A. Columbia University, B.A. Bennington College.

Areas of Research/Interest

Nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture; history of books and reading; literacy studies; childhood studies; critical pedagogy and civic engagement

Fellowships/Honors

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

Bio

Patricia Crain teaches, researches, and writes about nineteenth-century American literature and culture, the history of print culture and literacy, the history of childhood, and the relation between words and pictures. Her most recent book, Reading Children: Literacy, Property and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-century America (University of Pennsylvania, 2016; Early American Literature book prize), offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property.

The Story of A: the Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, 2000; MLA first book prize) relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of image-text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.

Recent essays include “Book” in Keywords for Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2021) and “How the Virgin Lost Her Book” in The Unfinished Book (Oxford, 2020).

She teaches courses in early American literature and culture, the history of books and reading, histories and literatures of childhood, and word and image studies.

Publications

  • The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter.
    Stanford University Press, 2000.
  • “Secret Lives of the 19th-Century Ballot.” Common-place. www.common-place.org. 9:1. October 2008.
  • “New Histories of Literacy.” The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Jonathon Rose and Simon Eliot. London: Blackwell, 2007.
  • “Spectral Literacy: The Case of Goody Two-Shoes.” Seen and Heard: the Place of the Child in Early Modern Europe 1550-1800. (Children’s Literature and Culture Series) Edited by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore. New York: Routledge, 2005.
  • “Children of Media, Children as Media: Optical Telegraphs, Indian Pupils, and Joseph Lancaster’s ‘System’ for Cultural Replication.” New Media, 1750-1914: Studies in Cultural Definition and Change. Ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003
  • “Good News and Bad Books.” (Chapter on American Eighteenth-Century Communities of Print.) Perspectives in American Book History. Eds. Scott Casper, Joanne Chaison, Jeff Groves. Amherst: U Massachusetts P, 2002.
  • Reading Children Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America
    University of Pennsylvania Press. 2016