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.  
Photograph Courtesy of John Pankratz



Research Interests

Transatlantic and American literature 1600-1800. Publications include a book on American puritan poetry and articles on early American lyric, colonial responses to mastodon teeth, commonplace books, Shakespeare in America, and revolutionary art and literature. I also work on modern U.S. and transatlantic literature and culture, including the art and poetry of Mina Loy, and twentieth-century representations of homelessness.

 

Areas of Graduate Supervision

American and transatlantic writing, especially early American.  

 

Selected Publications

  • 'Edward Taylor and the Art of Assemblage' in The Forms of the Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Visual Art, ed. Matthew Pethers and Daniel Couch, forthcoming with Bucknell University Press.

  • ‘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