Research Interests
- 19th-century American literature
- Literature and medicine
- Digital humanities
Biography
Josh Doty, Ph.D., specializes in American literature with particular interest in the intersections of science, medicine and culture. He teaches courses in pre-1900 American literature, critical theory, the digital humanities and the medical humanities. He has served as Department Chair of English Literature and Language since 2022 and is the founding director of St. Mary’s Medical Humanities program. He has also taught a course on anime and co-directed a study abroad program that brought St Mary’s students to Japan.
Doty’s research investigates how nineteenth-century American literature engages with questions of health, the body and medical knowledge. His book, The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature (UNC Press, Fall 2020) examines the intersection of medicine, health reform and literature in the antebellum United States. His essays on literature, medicine and culture have been published in journals such as Early American Literature, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review.
His current book project examines how American writers responded to the opening of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century.
Publications
“Charles Darwin’s Colors: Science, Subjectivity, and Representation.” South Atlantic Review, forthcoming.
“Health and Illness in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Approaches to Teaching Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by Lynn Domina. Modern Language Association, 2024, pp. 62-67.
“Melville.” American Literary Scholarship: An Annual 2020, edited by David J. Nordloh, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 37-45.
“C19, Covid-19, and Conferencing.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, special issue on “Nineteenth-Century Scholars Respond to a Twenty-First Century Pandemic,” vol. 67, no. 1, 2021, pp. 236-45.
The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
“Fourierism and Nervous Sympathy in The Blithedale Romance.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 45.1 (Spring, 2019): 26-45.
“Digesting Moby-Dick.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 19.1 (Spring, 2017): 85-101.
“Satire, Minstrelsy, and Embodiment in Sheppard Lee.” Early American Literature 51.1 (Spring, 2016): 131-156.
“William Faulkner’s Embodied Subjectivities.” Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity. Ed. Donald Wehrs. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013. 111-131.