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

  • ‘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.

  • "New England Writing in a Material World" (review) William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010): 587-593
  • "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