David T. Humphries

MALS Concentration:

American Studies

Courses Taught in MALS:

• Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies (70000)

• American Culture and Values (73100)

• American Social Institutions (73200)

Recent Publications:

• Different Dispatches: Journalism in American Modernist Prose. Routledge,  2006. (Paperback, 2014, Open access, 2019).

• “Going off the Gold Standard in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.” The Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2017, pp. 239-260.    

• “Gender Fantasies, Sexual Adventures, and Imagined Communities in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.” Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, edited by Precious McKenzie, Dialogue Series, edited by Henry Veggian, Brill / Rodopi, 2016, pp. 51-76.

• “Where ‘death and the graveyard are final’: The Shifting Boundaries of Authority in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2011, pp. 32-52.

• “Returning South: Reading Culture in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Zora  Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2009, pp. 69-86.

• Review of Collecting As Modernist Practice, by Jeremy Braddock. M/MLA: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 46, no. 2, 2013/2014, pp. 167-171.

Some of these and some older publications are available at: https://qcc-cuny.academia.edu/DavidHumphries

About Professor Humphries:

I am interested in many aspects of American Studies. My earlier research focused on the literature of the early twentieth-century and the interwar period, and I remain interested in how changing technologies, social institutions, and cultural norms are reflected in the narrative and representational strategies from that time.  As a faculty member and  former Department Chair and Interim Assistant Dean of Faculty, I led and participated in a number of planning processes, new student support strategies and programs, and faculty mentoring initiatives, and I was involved in the hiring of a significant number of full-time faculty. I have also spoken to groups of graduate students and advised individual graduate students about going on the academic and non-academic job markets. From these and other experiences, I have become interested in critical university studies, college and administration, writing pedagogy, and, more broadly, the functioning of contemporary American social institutions.