Spencer Tricker
Assistant Professor
I specialize in comparative ethnic American literature with emphases on Asian American and Pacific Islander writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My manuscript-in-progress, The Wavering Pacific: Literature, Empire, and Cosmopolitan Emotion, examines the uses and abuses of cosmopolitan discourse in work by writers from the United States, Canada, the Philippines, and Hawai‘i. My courses centrally explore issues of social justice and the transnational circulation of people, things, and ideas.
Podcast/radio appearances:
Education
Ph.D. in English, University of Miami
M.A. in Literary, Cultural, and Textual Studies, University of Central Florida
B.A. in English and American Literature, New York University
Research Interests
- Nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature
- Asia and the Pacific
- Asian American studies
- Imperialism and inter-imperial studies
- Settler colonialism
- Race and racism
- Affect studies
- Capitalism, anti-capitalism, and the history of labor
Publications/Research Listings
Forthcoming. “Emerson, Asia, and ‘the Progress of Culture.’” The New Cambridge Companion to Emerson, ed. Michael Jonik. Cambridge University Press.
The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics, ed. John Kerkering. Cambridge University Press.
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, vol. 49, no. 3, 2024, pp. 1-25.
Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture: Junctures of Time, Space, Self and Politics, ed. Edward Sugden. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
American Literary Realism, vol. 52, no. 3, 2020, pp. 234-63.
Studies in American Fiction, vol. 44, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-26. [Awarded the Melville Society’s annual Hennig Cohen Prize for best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville.]