Travis Foster

I teach courses in American literature and culture as well as gender and queer studies. My research focuses on nineteenth-century U.S. literary histories, with a particular focus on white supremacy and antiblackness, genre and genre criticism, and gender and queer studies.

My first book, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States, just came out with OUP’s Oxford Studies in American Literary History series. Currently, I’m working on a second book project, tentatively called Womanish: Nineteenth Century America and the Gender Called Gay and editing The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body. With Timothy Griffiths, I just finished co-editing a special issue of Legacy, “American Women’s Writing & the Genealogies of Queer Thought,” which came out summer 2020.

My articles have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, The Edith Wharton Review, ESQ, The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian American Literature, and History of the Present, among others. You can download them from my site in the Humanities Commons.