Department of English

William Scott

Prof. William Scott

Assistant Professor of English

412-624-3753
wdscott@pitt.edu

CL 517-D



Mailing Address:
University of Pittsburgh
English Department CL 526
4200 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

William Scott received his PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins University, studying in the areas of Romanticism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, African American and U.S. working-class literature.  His doctoral research dealt with radical American writers during the Great Depression; corporeality; modernism; monopoly capitalism; and the critique of representation.
His area of specialization is twentieth-century American and African American literature and culture.  His current research interests are focused on questions involving the body, performance, historicity, and representation, as well as the problematic relation, underlying historical narratives, between "scenes of subjection" (Saidiya Hartman) and the formation of a resistant subjectivity/agency.  He is currently at work on a book entitled Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker in the United States.


Recent Publications:

  • Belonging to History: Margaret Walker’s For My People, MLN, Comparative Literature Issue, vol. 121 n. 5 (December 2006): 1083-1106.
  • Material Resistance and the Agency of the Body in Ann Petry’s The Street, American Literature, vol. 78 n. 1 (March 2006): 89-116.
  • Motivos of Translation: Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes, CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 5 n. 2 (fall 2005): 35-71.
  • “To Make Up the Hedge and Stand in the Gap”: Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder, Callaloo, vol. 27 n. 2 (spring 2004): 522-41.

Teaching:

  • Undergraduate Courses
    • American Literary Traditions
    • 20th Century American Literature
    • Working Class Literature
    • Intro to Critical Reading
    • Senior Seminar: Invisibility in the Twentieth Century African American Novel
    • The Modernist Tradition
    • Sexuality and Representation
    • Literature and the Contemporary
  • Graduate Courses
    • Studies in U.S. Fiction: The Radical Novel in the Great Depression

University Service:

  • Graduate Placement and Professional Development Committee
  • Literature Curriculum Committee
  • Planning and Budget Committee
  • Senior American Literature Search Committee

Other Duties and Service:

  • Member, MLA
  • Reviewer for Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and The Philosophy of History
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