Amanda Claybaugh is professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches American and British novels from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship between literature and history: her first book, The Novel of Purpose (2007), explored how novelists responded to nineteenth-century reform movements such as abolitionism and temperance reform, and her new project considers the influence of the federal government on the development of regional literature. Prof. Claybaugh is particularly interested in the Civil War. She team-teaches a course on the Civil War for the general education curriculum at Harvard, and she is currently writing a book for a general audience, entitled The Years of Jubilee, about the South Carolina Sea Islands during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of English Dean of Undergraduate Education