I teach a wide range of courses at Ball State, from core curriculum classes to undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, research methods, the American renaissance, and biography. As a literary historian, I’m most concerned with questions of “why.” Why do literary genres fall in and out of favor, and develop as they do? Why do reading tastes change, and why do authors sometimes change with them? How do we construct knowledge about writers, writing, and literary culture, and why? What are the virtues and drawbacks of periodization, and why?
My teaching schedule and research agenda in many ways respond to these questions. I have published books on Transcendental magazines, on literary Romanticism, on biography and documentary scholarship, and most recently a book that explores Emerson’s posthumous reputation and the effect of his earliest biographers on it. My research examines how literary history is shaped by print and material culture (sometimes called “book history”). My latest project is to examine how authors’ reputations are constructed by the tourist industry in the public biographies created by literary house museums. That research has recently sent me to Maine and to Rye, England, where I’ve been studying the homes and lives of Sarah Orne Jewett and Henry James.
Like my other research, this project is grounded in manuscripts, business records, and other archival material—even postcards and collectible author dolls!--and has taken me to libraries and historical societies here and abroad. (In the past few years I have been to Spain, Portugal, and several times to England.) Not only does this research credential me to teach at the university level; it also enlivens my teaching, I hope, by making me the active learner that I expect my students to be.
In addition to my teaching and research, I am editor of the biannual journal Emerson Society Papers and President-Elect of the Emerson Society.
Classes Taught
Undergraduate: Reading Literature, American Literature I and II, Nineteenth-century American Literature, Literary History, Genre Studies, Studies in Authors, Senior Seminar
Graduate: Literary Research Methods, American Romanticism, Seminar in Literature, The Novel, Workshop in Literature
Areas of Specialization:
American literature to 1900, especially Emerson, Fuller, and the Transcendental writers; literary biography; textual studies and documentary editing; literary history
Dr. Habich's curriculum vitae