Author: Katie McGettigan

Katie McGettigan is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Nottingham. She is completing a monograph called Herman Melville and the Material Text, and is also working on a new project about the British publication of American literature, 1830-1860
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Book Review: Melville in his Own Time edited by Steven Olsen-Smith

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During my first research trip to the United States in Summer 2012, I persuaded my friend Margaret to drive us to Pittsfield, Massachusetts to visit Arrowhead – Herman Melville’s farm house. I was half-way through a PhD thesis on Melville, and felt that I couldn’t visit Massachusetts without going to the place where Melville wrote Moby-Dick. Partly, this was touristic curiosity, but there was some bit of me that thought I might better understand the books I was writing about if I could go to the place where Melville wrote them – if I could picture Melville in his immediate context. Continue reading

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Enemies at Home: THE AMERICANS Season Three

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For all its frequent use of Russian language (the extensive use of subtitles is striking in an American TV show) and Soviet protagonists, the heart of The Americans plays into the most mythic US trope of them all: the individual in the wilderness. Continue reading

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60 Seconds With Katie McGettigan

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How did you come to your current area of research?

“… I took a class in Bibliography and Book History during my Master’s, which got me started on the materiality of books. It suddenly seemed to illogical to me that I’d spend so much time thinking about texts, and so little time thinking about books as things. I’ve made up for that since.” Continue reading

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Review of 25th Annual Conference of American Literature Association 2014

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“What stood out from the conference was the breadth of American literary studies, both in terms of approaches, historical periods, and geography. There seems to have been no waning in Trans-American Studies (transatlantic, transpacific, transcontinental and more), with the borders of American Literature stretching ever further.” Continue reading