Primary Areas of Specialization
Nineteenth-Century American Literature; Poetry and Poetics; History of the Book
Field of Interests
Book and Media History, Early American, Nineteenth-Century American, Poetry & Poetics, Theory
Biographical Notes
Meredith L McGill's research and teaching focuses on American literature, book and media history, and poetry and poetics. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1837-1853 (2003; repr. 2007) a study of nineteenth-century American resistance to tight control over intellectual property. She has edited two collections of essays: Taking Liberties with the Author (2013), which explores the persistence of the author as a shaping force in literary criticism, and The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), in which a variety of scholars model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry within a transatlantic frame.
She co-directs the Black Bibliography Project with Jacqueline Goldsby (Yale University). In 2022, the BBP was awarded a significant grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the "implementation phase" of the project. You can read more about this project and the field of Black Bibliography itself in a special issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (Summer 2022); the introduction she co-wrote with Jacqueline Goldsby is open access.
Awards, Fellowships, and Grants
Mellon Foundation award, with Jacqueline Goldsby (Yale) to support the Black Bibliography Project's Implementation Phase, 2022-25
Mellon Foundation award, with Jacqueline Goldsby (Yale), to support the Black Bibliography Project, 2019-2021
Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2019
Beinecke Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities, Beinecke Library, Yale University 2019-20
Class of 1932 Fellow, Council of the Humanities, Department of English, and the Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, Spring 2016
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society 2003-4
NEH/ Newberry Library Fellowship, 1995-6
Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 1995
Selected Publications
Books:
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003
The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Taking Liberties with the Author
American Council of Learned Societies, 2013
Other Selected Publications:
“What is ‘Black’ about Black Bibliography?,” with Jacqueline Goldsby. Special issue on Black Bibliography, Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith L. McGill, eds. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 116:2 (June 2022), 161-189.
“Books on the Loose,” in Alexandra Gillespie and Deirdre Lynch, eds. The Unfinished Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 79-93.
“Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism 59:4 (Winter 2020), 475-492.
“Format,” Early American Studies special issue on “Keywords in Early American Literature and Material Texts,” ed. by Marcy Dinius and Sonia Hazard (Fall, 2018), 671-7.
“What is a Ballad? Reading for Genre, Format, and Medium,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 70:2 (September 2016), 156-175.
“American Poetry: What, Me Worry?” (A response to Stephen Burt). American Literary History28:2 (Summer 2016), 288-94.
“Literary History, Book History, and Media Studies” in Hester Blum, ed. Turns of Event: American Literary Studies in Motion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 23-39.
“Echocriticism: Repetition and the Order of Texts,” American Literature 88:1 (March 2016), 1-29.
“The Poetry of Slavery,” in Ezra Tawil, ed. Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115-136.
“The Perils of Authorship, Literary Property and Nineteenth-Century American Fiction,” with Lara Langer Cohen, Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol 5: The American Novel to 1870, J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 195-212.
“Copyright and Intellectual Property: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 16 (2013), 387-427
“Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” in Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 53-74.
“The Future of the Literary Past,” with Andrew Parker, PMLA 125.4 (October, 2010), 959-967
“Walt Whitman and the Poetics of Reprinting,” in David Blake and Michael Robertson eds., Where the Future Becomes Present: Whitman and Leaves of Grass. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 37-58
“Market,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of American Cultural Studies, Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 149-52
"Remediating Whitman" PMLA, 2007122:5 (October 2007), 1592-6.
"Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"
ALH: American Literary History, March 2007, 357-74
Graduate:
- American Literature
- Literary Properties
- Literary Theory
Undergraduate
- Principles of Literary Study
- American Literature
- Literary Theory
- Nineteenth-century Women's Writing
Professional Memberships and Affiliations
- Trustee, English Institute, 2015-2022
- President, C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 2018-2020
- Executive Committee, Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Modern Language Association, 2011-16; Chair 2016
- General Editor, ACLS e-book series, Selected Essays from the English Institute, 2010-13