Join us virtually on Zoom to hear Philip Gould discuss his newest book War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North, (2024). Gould will speak generally about the work and also give an overview of its readings, from authors such as Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott. By the end of the program the audience will see the parallels between the wartime state in the 1860s, with its expansion of federal and executive authority, to political questions we face today.
Philip Gould is the Israel J. Kapstein Chair of English at Brown University, where he teaches in both the English and History Departments. His work focuses primarily in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American literary studies, as well as the American Revolution and early US republic. Gould was a Northeast Modern Language Association Fellow at AAS in 1999-00 and was elected to membership in October 2003.