Alan Rauch

(Ph.D., Rutgers University)
Associate Professor of English
Department of English
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223

E-mail: arauch@uncc.edu

Introduction:

Welcome to my home page. This is my sixth year at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, after having spent 13 years as a faculty member in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition to my position in the Department of English and an adjunct appointment as Associate Professor of History, I recently stepped down as Director of the M.A. in Liberal Studies which is currently being overseen by Prof. Paula Eckard.

Planning is well underway for the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Society, for Literature, Science, and the Arts, which promises to be an exciting event in Charlotte. Please contact me for information or follow the link below for more details about the conference!

My forthcoming book is a reprint of the travel narrative titled England in 1815, which was written by an American businessman just after the War of 1812. The reprint will be published by Palgrave MacMillan in Fall 2008. Part of the work has been supported by a Fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In progress is a manuscript dealing with the dissemination of knowledge and the role of private subscription libraries in Leeds, Manchester, and Newcastle. My ongoing work includes the study of earthen ware"bric-a-brac" as emblems of knowledge, Rousseau's influence on the encyclopedic movement in England, the work of naturalist and novelist, W. H. Hudson, and the cultural status of animals including sloths and dolphins. (A more detailed description of my research and interests can be found below.)

  Configurations: A Journal of Science, Technology, and Literature:

|| Author's Guide - Configurations ||     || Book Review Guide - Configurations ||     || Membership Form for SLSA ||

For English Majors & Current Students:
|| Style Guide for Papers || Common Writing Problems || Writing Overview || Email Etiquette || Terms in Literary & Cultural Criticism

|| Literary Sources and Sites || The M.A. Concentration in Children's Literature ||

Guides to joining UNCC LISTSERVS that I moderate:
|| LSALUM-L- For Liberal Studies Alumni   || ENGLMAJ- For English Majors   || ENGLGRAD- For English Grad Students ||

Previous Courses:

|| Colonial Literature (Spring 2005) || British Literature Survey 2 (Spring 2005) || Reading Literature: English 2100 || The Victorian Novel || ||Darwin & the Crisis of Faith || Alan's courses from Fall 2002 ||

RESEARCH & INTERESTS:

My research in the cultural studies of science deals primarily with the dissemination of knowledge in the nineteenth century and its impact on the novel. The book discusses the influence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and of other compendia of knowledge on "pre-Darwinian" authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, and George Eliot. The book, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and 'The March of Intellect', which focuses on encyclopedias and similar "knowledge texts," is available from Duke University Press. Useful Knowledge was selected by Choice as an "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year."

I have also edited The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), a work of speculative fiction written by the horticultural popularizer, Jane Webb Loudon (University of Michigan Press, 1994). Prior to that I co-edited, with George Levine, One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (University of Wisconsin, 1987).
While at Georgia Tech I helped develop our undergraduate degree program in Science, Technology, and Culture (STAC). Along with Hugh Crawford, of Georgia Tech, I edit Configurations: A Journal of Literature , Science, and Technology which is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. I was a founding editor of the journal and served as Book Review Editor for over a decade. I also serve as Vice-President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts which is an organization devoted to the cultural study of science, technology, and culture. (A form for membership can be found here.) In my latter years at Georgia Tech I spent two years as Associate Chair and one year as Interim Chair (FY 99-00)
I am currently looking at the impact of private subscription libraries in England. While at the Huntington Library, I held the Trent Dames Fellow in the History of Civil Engineering. My research there, on turnpikes, bridges, roads, and travel, feeds directly into my work on the dissemination of knowledge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the last few years, I have also been a Fellow at the Centre for Reasearch in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University, and at the Harry Ransom Research Center. Finally, I am working on an essay called "Ephemeral Millennium: The Future of History in a Digital Age," which explores the impact of the loss of digital documents in our cultural development.

Publications & Works in Progress

|| Publications || Women in Science, Technology, & Culture [In progress] || "Private Reading: Public Knowledge"

Revised: 01/22/07