B.A., English, University of California/Berkeley
Ph.D., English, 1993, University of California/Berkeley
Office: UW1-333 and UW1-390D
Phone: 425.352.5403
Email: burgett@u.washington.edu
Mailing: Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246
At UWB and elsewhere, I firmly believe that lively teaching requires lively research, and that both need to be tied closely to questions and problems that arise in everyday life. In order to maximize the interplay between these activities, I find myself dedicating more and more of my time in the classroom to teaching students how the think about the world as researchers. To do this, I stage classroom experiences that enable us to engage with the materials at hand, while also modeling ways of understanding our relationship to those materials not simply as passive consumers of prepackaged information, but as creators of new knowledge for ourselves, for our fellow students, and for the various worlds that we inhabit in other aspects of our everyday lives. This means that, in all of my classes, my teaching style asks and enables students to engage actively and critically with course materials in a variety of interdisciplinary contexts. Success comes when I learn as much in the classroom as my students. In addition to teaching at UWB, I am graduate faculty in the English Department at UW Seattle where I teach occasional graduate courses and supervise doctoral work. I also work with graduate students across the UW through two ongoing projects designed to promote interdisciplinarity and publicly engaged research and teaching: the Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students and the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy.
BIS 300 Interdisciplinary Inquiry; or, Knowledge Travels
BIS 367 Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity
BIS 368 Sex, Love, Romance
BIS 370 Nineteenth-Century American Literature
BIS 418 Masculinity, Homoeroticism, and Queer Theory
BIS 455 Literature and Sexuality: Race and Sexuality in American Culture
BIS 470 Art, Politics, and Social Change: Critical Theories of Public Culture
BIS 490 Senior Seminar: Intersections of Sex and Race
BIS 495 Internship: Worlds of Work
My research interests fall into an a number of broad categories: American Studies, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Interdisciplinary and Public Scholarship. My first book focused on the intersection of these fields in the specific context of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States, while thinking about the significance of those historical periods in relation to the concerns of our contemporary worlds. My current scholarship expands on this research in various ways. I am working on two books: American Sex: Cultures of Sexual Reform in and beyond the Antebellum U.S. (University of Chicago Press) and New Formations of Cultural Studies: Collaboration, Practice, Research. I recently finished co-editing (with Glenn Hendler) a volume entitled Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press), and developing an accompanying website. In 2002-2003, I co-directed (with Chandan Reddy) a year-long research collaboration and lecture series sponsored by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, Thinking Sex in Transnational Times; in 2004-2005, I co-directed (with Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren) a year-long series of workshops, public forums, and site visits entitled Placing the Humanities: New Locates, New Meanings; I currently co-direct (with Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren) the activities of the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective. In September 2005, 2006, and 2007, I co-directed (with Miriam Bartha) the Simpson Center's week long Institute in the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students, and I currently co-direct (with Becky Rosenberg and Martha Groom) IAS's Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy. All of these collaborations have been central to the development of the new Masters of Arts in Cultural Studies in IAS. I served in 2003 on the selection committee for the American Studies Association's Lora Romero Prize for the best first book on the intersections of nation, race, gender, class, and sexuality, and from 2002 to 2005 sat on the editorial board of the journal American Literature. I currently consult for several scholarly presses and sit on the Editorial Boards of American Quarterly and American Literary History. I also serve on the Executive Committee of the US Cultural Studies Association and am an Associate of the Centre for Culture, Identity, and Education.
Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York: New York UP, 2007.
Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.
"On the Mormon Question: Race, Sex, and Polygamy in the U.S. 1850s and 1990s," American Quarterly, 57, 1 (March 2005), 75-102.
"The Heart of Civilization, Journal of British and American Studies, 10 (2004).
"Between Speculation and Population: The Problem of 'Sex' in Our Long Eighteenth Century" Early American Literature (special issue on "Interiority"), 37, 1 (2002).
