Andrew Wildermuth
Andrew is from Annapolis, Maryland, where he studied at Anne Arundel Community College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland and graduated in 2017. He received an MA in North American studies from FAU in 2021. Since 2022, he has been a research associate in “The Sentimental,” where he submitted his dissertation—“American Malleability: Aesthetics and Politics of Change in U.S. Literature and Print, 1820–1870”—in June 2025. His doctoral work in “The Sentimental” has been supported by research stays as a Packer Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Thoreau Society Fellow, and a BAA Postgraduate Fellow at Harvard. His research has been published in Amerikastudien, Iperstoria, and ZAA. He is co-editor of the literary journal The TRIAL and his poems have been published in The Yale Review, Oxford Poetry, and Lana Turner. His new postdoctoral project, “American Primordial,” examines American origin stories from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.
Project: American Malleability: Aesthetics and Politics of Change in U.S. Literature and Print, 1820–1870
Submitted in June 2025, my PhD examines the relation between print and ideology in the United States in the wake of profound transformations to both print technology and political economy in the final years of the 1820s. New people got access to new machines—and new ideas were born, which still stubbornly impact the world we live in. I thus examine the respective engagements of “malleability”—or, the aesthetics and politics of change—in texts by authors including Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, William Apess, and John Rollin Ridge, as well as in newspapers across the middle part of the century. From the Cherokee Nation to California to the countryside of Massachusetts, print texts contest debates over navigating novel political arrangements. In reading these curious texts comparatively, I argue, we might find important origins of the affective arrangements of modern political life.
Papers and Talks
• “American Primordial: Borders of Civilization between The Cherokee Phoenix and Anglo-American Coverage of the 1762 Cherokee Delegation to London,” Symposium of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Paris-Cité, France, December 2025 (forthcoming)
• “‘The Great Panacea for All the Disorders in the Universe, Is Love’: The Penitentiary and Women’s Health in Fuller’s Tribune and Child’s Letters from New-York,” Critical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Sorbonne University, Paris, France, October 2025
• “1956: Some Trees, Howl, and the Rupture of Pleasure Politics in Poetry of Late Capital,” BAA Summer Academy on “North American Narratives of Crisis and Repair,” Montréal, Québec, July 2025
• “1827: Freedom’s Journal, The Cherokee Phoenix, and the Birth of Radical-Critical Print,” Annual Meeting of the German Association of American Studies, University of Siegen, Germany, June 2025
• “Malleability in American Periodical Cultures, 1820–1850,” American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, September 2024
• “Tale Twice Told: Law, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Reforming Boston in Apess’s Indian Nullification (1835) and Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852),” Nineteenth-Century Global Cities and Urban Worlds: Symposium of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, Aix-Marseille University, France, June 2024
• “‘My Heart, a Wall / of Living, Loving Clay’: Feeling, Flesh, and Malleability in Frances Harper’s Moses: A Story of the Nile,” Final Conference of Voices/Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600–1865, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, March 2024
• “‘Pamphlets of a Very Seditious & Inflammatory Character’: Inflammation and Injury in Walker’s Appeal,” Symposium of the British Association for Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Bristol, England, December 2023
• “She, He, and We: Pronouns, Protest, and the Politics of Baez–Dylan in D.C.,” Sentimental Ballads in Popular Music, International Symposium, University of Siegen, Germany, September 2023
• “Foraging, Forging, Forgoing: Thoreau as Settler Disaster,” Annual Conference of the Bavarian American Academy, Munich, Germany, July 2023
• “Reading the Body Politic: Phrenology, Ideology, and the Malleable in Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845),” Annual Conference of the British Association of American Studies, Keele University, England, April 2023
• “Reading, Liberatory Violence, and Malleability in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” Infrastructures of Racism and the Contours of Black Vitality and Resistance: An International Conference, University of Torino, Italy, March 2023
Reviews
• Review of Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, by Matthew Rebhorn, 2025, Cambridge University Press, in Studies in the Novel (forthcoming, 2026)
• Review of Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America, by Scott Gac, 2024, Cambridge University Press. Amerikastudien / American Studies 70, no. 3 (2025): 365–368.
Book Contributions and Special Issues
• “Worlds Different: Occupying Washington, Baez–Dylan, and Our Crises in ‘Sentimental Political Storytelling’,” Special Issue on “Sentimental Pop Ballads” in European Journal of Musicology (under review, 2026)
• “Foraging, Forging, Forgoing—or, Thoreau’s Settler Disaster in the Age of Walker and Apess,” 2026 Annual Publication of the Bavarian American Academy on “Environmental Citizenship,” Universitätsverlag Winter (forthcoming, 2026)
Peer-Reviewed Articles
• “American Malleability: 1820s Print Revolutions and the Aesthetics and Politics of Change in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 70, no. 2 (2025): 135–55.
• “‘Water, Water Everywhere’: Flows, Fate, and Transcendental Settlerism in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843.” Iperstoria 19 (2022): 49–65.
• “Measured Life: Making Live, the ‘Modern System of Science,’ and the Animated Bodies of Frankenstein.” ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 69, no. 4 (2021): 331–48.
• “‘A Thing Apart’: Sonnet Poetics and Radical Politics in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows.” aspeers 14 (2021): 15–31.