Director and Professor
B.A., English, University of California/Berkeley
Ph.D., English, 1993, University of California/Berkeley
Office: UW1-390D (and UW1-333)
Phone: 425.352.5350
Email: burgett@u.washington.edu
Mailing: Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246
Teaching
I believe that lively teaching requires lively research, and that both need to be tied closely to questions and problems that arise in everyday life. In order to maximize the interplay between these activities, I dedicate more and more of my time in the classroom to teaching students how the think about the world as researchers. To do this, I stage classroom experiences that enable us to engage with the materials at hand, while also modeling ways of understanding our relationship to those materials not simply as passive consumers of pre-packaged information, but as creators of new knowledge for ourselves, for our fellow students, and for the various worlds that we inhabit in other aspects of our everyday lives. All of my classes ask and enable students to engage actively and critically with course materials in a variety of interdisciplinary contexts. Success comes when I learn as much in the classroom as my students.
In addition to teaching at UWB, I am adjunct faculty in the English Department at UW Seattle where I teach occasional graduate courses and supervise doctoral work. I also work with graduate students across the UW through two ongoing projects designed to promote interdisciplinarity and community-engaged research and teaching: IAS's Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy and the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students.
Recent Courses Taught
BIS 300 Interdisciplinary Inquiry; or, Knowledge Travels
BIS 367 Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity
BIS 368 Sex, Love, Romance
BIS 370 Nineteenth-Century American Literature
BIS 418 Masculinity, Homoeroticism, and Queer Theory
BIS 455 Literature and Sexuality: Race and Sexuality in American Culture
BIS 470 Art, Politics, and Social Change: Critical Theories of Public Culture
BIS 490 Senior Seminar: Intersections of Sex and Race
BIS 495 Internship: Worlds of Work
BCULST 500: Formations of Cultural Studies
Research/Scholarship
My research interests fall into several broad categories: American Studies, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Interdisciplinary and Public Scholarship. My first book, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton UP), focused on the intersection of these fields in the specific context of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States. My current scholarship expands on this research in various ways. I am working on two books: American Sex: Cultures of Sexual Reform in and beyond the Antebellum U.S. (University of Chicago Press) and New Formations of Cultural Studies. I recently finished co-editing (with Glenn Hendler) a volume entitled Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press).
In 2002-2003, I co-directed (with Chandan Reddy) a year-long research collaboration and lecture series sponsored by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, Thinking Sex in Transnational Times; in 2004-2005, I co-directed (with Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren) a year-long series of workshops, public forums, and site visits entitled Placing the Humanities: New Locates, New Meanings; I currently co-direct (with Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren) the activities of the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective. In September 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, I co-directed (with Miriam Bartha) the Simpson Center's week long Institute in the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students, and I currently co-direct (with David Goldstein and Martha Groom) IAS's Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy. All of these collaborations have been central to the development of the new Masters of Arts in Cultural Studies in IAS.
I served in 2003 on the selection committee for the American Studies Association's Lora Romero Prize for the best first book on the intersections of nation, race, gender, class, and sexuality, and from 2002 to 2005 sat on the editorial board of the journal American Literature. I currently serve on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and American Literary History, and the press committee of the University of Washington Press. I also serve on the executive committees of the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities and the US Cultural Studies Association and as the vice chair of the national advisory board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.
Selected Publications
Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York: NYU Press, 2007.
Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.
"Sex, Panic, Nation," American Literary History (2008), 1-20.
"The History of x in Early America," Early American Literature (forthcoming).
"Mixed Genealogies: Between Cultural Studies and American Studies" (forthcoming).
"On the Mormon Question: Race, Sex, and Polygamy in the U.S. 1850s and 1990s," American Quarterly, 57, 1 (March 2005), 75-102.
"The Heart of Civilization, Journal of British and American Studies, 10 (2004).
"Between Speculation and Population: The Problem of 'Sex' in Our Long Eighteenth Century" Early American Literature (special issue on "Interiority"), 37, 1 (2002).