Dr Amy Morris, Faculty of English

amer1@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Biographical Information

I studied English at Newnham College, Cambridge, and went on to complete an MPhil and PhD in American literature at Cambridge. During my doctoral studies, I spent two years at Harvard as a Frank Knox Fellow. Before taking up a teaching position at Cambridge, I lectured for a year at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. I am married with four lovely children who continually inspire and interrupt my scholarly work.  



Research Interests

Transatlantic and American literature 1600-1800. Publications include a book on American puritan poetry and articles on early American lyric with a particular focus on the work of Edward Taylor. I've written on colonial responses to mastodon teeth, commonplace books, Algonquian-English seventeenth-century print, Shakespeare in eighteenth-century America, and US revolutionary art and writing. I've also published on modern U.S. and transatlantic literature and culture, including the art and poetry of Mina Loy, and twentieth-century representations of homelessness. My work combines close reading with historical, contextual research and often involves visual and material text approaches. I am open to working transhistorically and transmedially on American materials. 

Areas of Graduate Supervision

American and transatlantic writing, especially early American.  

 

Selected Publications

  •  ‘The typographical contact zone of Algonquian-English bilingual print’ in Polyglot Pages in Early Modern England (c.1500-1700) ed. Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin (Brepols, forthcoming 2025)

  • Matoaka/Pocahontas/Rebecca: Her Atlantic Identities and Afterlives ed. Kathryn N Gray and Amy M E Morris, (University of Virginia Press, 2024)

  • ‘Edward Taylor and the Art of Assemblage’ in The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture and Visual Art, ed. Daniel Couch and Matthew Pethers (Bucknell UP, 2024), 249–74 (26 pages).
  • ‘How to read early American poetry’ in Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature, ed. Bryce Traister (Cambridge: CUP, 2021), 49-67.

  • ‘Charles Willson Peale, Nancy Hallam, and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline on the Revolutionary Stage’, in The Art of Revolutions, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 109.5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2021), 31–60.

  • '“He’s just a bum, but who ain’t?": the mirror of homelessness' in Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues, ed. Sanja Bahun and Bojana Petric, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

  • 'From Rattlesnake Eggs to Alexander the Great: Edward Taylor’s Commonplace Book', Yearbook of English Studies 46 (2016): 90–111.

  • 'Geomythology on the colonial frontier: Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather and the Claverack giant', William and Mary Quarterly 70.4 (October 2013), 701–724.

  • ‘"You should have disappeared years ago"— the poetics of cultural disappearance in Mina Loy’s late poems', Critical Quarterly 55.2 (July 2013): 81–104.

  • 'The Art of Purifying: The Bay Psalm Book and Colonial Puritanism', Early American Literature 42.1 (2007): 107-130

  • 'Plainness and Paradox: Colonial Tensions in the Early New England Religious Lyric', Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, Blackwell, 2005, 500-516

  • Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (University of Delaware Press/ Associated University Presses, 2005)

  • 'Literature of the American Revolution: the Representative Voice', The Cambridge Quarterly 26, 1997, 19-41