Amy E. Hungerford

Amy Hungerford is the Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Ruth Fulton Benedict Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She was previously Bird White Housum Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at Yale. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially the period since 1945. Her monograph, Making Literature Now (Stanford, 2016) is about the social networks that support and shape contemporary literature in both traditional and virtual media. A hybrid work of ethnography, polemic, and traditional literary criticism, the book examines how those networks shape writers’ creative choices and the choices we make about reading. Prof. Hungerford is also the author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago, 2003) and Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton, 2010) and serves as the editor of the ninth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume E, “Literature, 1945 to the Present.” 

Prof. Hungerford’s undergraduate teaching is known worldwide through her popular, and free, online course, “The American Novel Since 1945.” Prof. Hungerford is a founder of Post45 (a professional association for scholars working in post-45 literary and cultural studies), and of post45.org (an open-access journal publishing a curated stream of peer reviewed and general interest work in the field). Working with Prof. Andrew Piper of McGill University, she collaborated to launch a companion open-access journal called CA: A Journal of Cultural Analytics, to showcase literary scholarship that uses computational methods. It is intended to serve as a hub for sharing data and innovations in method as well as particular research findings.

Her reviewing and public media work has included essays on contemporary fiction in the Yale Review, as well as contributions to The Chronicle of Higher Education, various online forums, and radio programs on NPR.