Dr Geoffrey Kirsch, Trinity

gk499@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am currently a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, and received my PhD in English from Harvard University.  My research interests lie at the intersection of nineteenth-century American literature and legal, economic, and political history.  My book Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Law of the Market, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2027, examines how antebellum American authors and jurists jointly negotiated the proper boundaries of a rapidly growing marketplace.  The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed both the birth of a distinctly American literature and the integration of local economies into a national market under the sway of an increasingly powerful federal government.  Collectively described by historians as the “market revolution,” these events—industrial and infrastructural advancement, economic interconnection, and political centralization—prompted a compensating movement toward closure and containment, whether in the form of protective tariffs, limited legal liability, or constitutional federalism.  Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Law of the Market foregrounds this dialectic between openness and boundedness, connection and separation, as a formal problem central to both American law and American literature.  In keeping with its emphasis on reciprocity, it juxtaposes a rich corpus of primary sources—commercial magazines, political speeches, petitions to Congress, and most extensively, legal treatises and judicial opinions—with canonical writing by authors including Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau.  I reveal these writers’ shared concern over whether and how to curtail the scope of economic, legal, and moral responsibility, as well as their efforts to erect boundaries around the market in order to safeguard what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable.”

In a further juxtaposition of legal and literary history, my second book, I Will Be Heard: Abolitionism and the Birth of Free Speech, will examine how antislavery writers and activists including Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, and William Lloyd Garrison responded to government censorship and mob violence by developing a robust theory and praxis of free expression and assembly—an extralegal free-speech tradition that was ultimately absorbed into judicial interpretations of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

My writing has appeared in journals including American Literary History; American Literary Realism; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies; The New England Quarterly; PMLA; and the Review of English Studies.  I previously earned a B.A. in English, summa cum laude, from Dartmouth College, where I was valedictorian of the Class of 2009, and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School.  I worked as a law clerk at the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and practiced appellate and corporate litigation in Boston before returning to academia.

Research Interests

19th and early 20th century American literary history; law and literature; American legal history and constitutional law; freedom of speech; Transcendentalism; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David Thoreau; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Herman Melville; Frederick Douglass; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Henry James; Charles Chesnutt; Edith Wharton; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Selected Publications

Books:

 

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Law of the Market.  Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2027).

 

Peer-Reviewed Articles:     

    

“Piercing the Corporate Whale: Agents, Principals, and the Personified Impersonal in Moby-Dick.”  Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 26, no. 3 (2024): pp. 55-68.

“‘What’s He a Judge Of?’: Blood Meridian’s Paths of Law.”  Law, Culture and the Humanities 19, no. 3 (2023): pp. 569-83.

“Loss Without Remedy: Moby-Dick and the Laws of Compensation.”  PMLA 138, no. 1 (2023): pp. 37-51.

“Innocence and the Arena: Wharton, Roosevelt, and Good Citizenship.”  American Literary Realism 51, no. 3 (2019): pp. 200-19.

“‘So Much a Piece of Nature’: Emerson, Webster, and the Transcendental Constitution.”  The New England Quarterly 91, no. 4 (2018): pp. 625-50.

“Henry James, Inheritance, and the Problem of the Dead Hand.”  Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Journal 47, no. 3 (2013): pp. 435-65.

 

Book Chapters/Reference Works:

 

“Infra-Humanism and Infrastructuralism.”  Entry in The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Kristen Case and James Finley (forthcoming).

“Higher Law.”  Entry in The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, edited by Robert Spoo and Simon Stern, pp. 233-36 (2025).

 

Book Reviews:

 

Review of Stefanie Mueller, The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination (2022).  Law & Literature 37, no. 1 (2025): pp. 211-13.

Review of Erin Forbes, Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845 (2024).  The Review of English Studies 75, no. 322 (2024): pp. 620-22.

Essay review of D. Berton Emerson and Gregory Laski, eds., Democracies in America: Keywords for the 19^th Century and Today (2023), and Cass R. Sunstein, How to Interpret the Constitution (2023).  American Literary History 36, no. 3 (2024): pp. 797-808.

Review of Lisa Siraganian, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (2021).  Modern Fiction Studies 67, no. 4 (2021): pp. 803-06.

 

Public Audience:      

  

“From Quiet Desperation to Quiet Quitting.”  Review of John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living.  Los Angeles Review of Books, June 13, 2023.

“From Compromise to New Birth: Lincoln’s Constitution, and Ours.”  Review of Noah Feldman, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America (2021), and James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (2021).  New Rambler Review, March 3, 2022.

“Poetic Justice: Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Life in Law and Letters.”  Review of Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas (2019).  Los Angeles Review of Books, August 27, 2019.