CUNY Academic Commons

Refereed Journal Articles
“Melville’s Queer Hauntology: Selections from the Journals of Philip C. Van Buskirk.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 22:1 (2020): 28-54.
“Homosocial Desire and Erotic Communitas in Melville’s Imaginary: The Evidence of Van Buskirk.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 62:2 (2016): 355-414.
Web-Based Publications
“Cooper’s Heroic David Gamut.” James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art Papers from the 2007 Cooper Seminar No. 16.
http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/articles/suny/2007suny-knip.html
Digital Humanities
The Philip C. Van Buskirk Archive
https://vanbuskirk.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Courses Taught at Hunter College, CUNY (one section unless specified)

Special Topics Courses

Queer Voices

Dissident Desires and Pleasures in New York’s Queer Underworld

Literary Theory and Criticism (26 sections)

Survey of American Literature: Origins to the Civil War (11 sections)

Survey of British Literature: Anglo-Saxon to Romanticism (6 sections)

American Literature 1865 to 1914 (2 sections)

Western Literary Backgrounds

Writing Courses

Writing about Literature (5 sections)

Theory and Practice of Expository Writing

Composition and Rhetoric Courses

Argument, Justice, and Protest

Justice and the Feminist Ethics of Care

Introduction to Literary Studies themed as:

Whitman, Dickinson, and the Erotic as Power (3 sections)

Sex, Desire, and Identity in Literature and Theory (3 sections)

Orgiastic Impulses in American Literature (2 sections)

Dissident Desires and Pleasures in New York’s Queer Underworld

Human and Non-Human Animals in Relationship

Romantic Friendship in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Romantic Friendship and Henry James’ The Bostonians

Moby-Dick or The Book About Everything Except Whales

Overcoming Heterosexuality: Thinking More Capacious Pasts and Futures

2017 PSC/CUNY Adjunct-CET Professional Development Grant
2017 CUNY Graduate Center Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant
2016 CUNY Graduate Center Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant
2014-15 Calder Dissertation Year Fellowship
2009-12 Hunter College Grad-A Fellowship
2004-09 Graduate Center Chancellor’s Fellowship

Invited Talks

2018 “The Erotic Importance of the Van Buskirk Diaries to the Histories of Art, Literature, and Sexuality.” University of Washington Allen Library, October 18. https://pnwblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/05/lecture-oct-18-2018-the-erotic-importance-of-the-van-buskirk-diaries-to-the-histories-of-art-literature-and-sexuality/

2019 “Tracing the Material Culture of Homosocial Desire from Van Buskirk and Melville into Painting, Advertising, and Photography” on the panel “Coming Before/Beside Melville: Desiring Se(a)men” at the 12th International Melville Society convention, June 18.

2017 “Erotic (Dis)Identification in the Journals of Philip C. Van Buskirk,” Pedagogies of Dissent, American Studies Association, November, 12.

2017 “Historicizing Melville’s Queer, Trans-Atlantic Labyrinth,” Melville’s Crossings, The International Melville Society Conference, London, UK, June 27.

2016 “Class, Intimacy, and Identity in the Journals of Philip C. Van Buskirk,” MMLA, St. Louis, November 9.

2014 “Pirate Heterotopias and the Black Atlantic,” Currents of the Black Atlantic: On the Genealogies and Futures of Diasporic Inquiry, CUNY Graduate Center, March 14.

2007 “Cooper’s Heroic David Gamut,” 16th Cooper Conference and Seminar, The Coopers’ Worlds: Literature and the Formation of a New American Paradigm, SUNY Oneonta, July 9.

2005 “Chaucer’s Queer Theologian and the Power of the Imagination,” The First Ralahine Conference on Utopian Studies, Exploring the Utopian Impulse, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, March 12.

Ph.D. English, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, expected 2022.
Dissertation: Before Melville’s Masts: Sex in the Age of Sail
Committee: Wayne Koestenbaum (chair), Sarah Chinn, Mario DiGangi, Eric Lott.
M. Phil. English with Distinction, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2014.

Nineteenth-century American culture and literature; New York City’s queer underworld; working-class and sailor sexuality; spaces of orgiastic ecstasis; queer theory; human/non-human animal, gender, and sexuality studies.

The 2017 Hennig Cohen Prize of the Melville Society for the best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville, for “Homosocial Desire and Erotic Communitas in Melville’s Imaginary: The Evidence of Van Buskirk,” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 62:2 (2016).

Chair of the Melville Society’s Hennig Cohen Prize committee, 2020-2021.

Three-year appointment to the Hennig Cohen Prize committee of The Melville Society, 2019-2021.