Amy Kaplan: Transnational Melville

Amy Kaplan

Amy Kaplan is Edward W. Kane professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2002) and The Social Construction of American Realism (1988), and co-editor of Cultures of US Imperialism (1993).

She has received an NEH fellowship and the Norman Forster prize for the best essay in American literature in 1998 for "Manifest Domesticity." She has published essays on contemporary culture and the politics of empire, including "Homeland Insecurities," "Where is Guantanamo?" and "Imperial Melancholy in America"� in American Quarterly and Raritan, as well as op-eds in the LA Times and International Herald Tribune.

She is currently working on a book on American Zionism. She served as the president of the American Studies Association in 2003.