Gregory S. Jackson F'11, F'04

Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars 2011
Associate Professor
Department: English
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
The Reader’s Progress: Narrating the Lives of the Faithful in America, 1800-1945

While religious novels by far out number all other novels in the U.S. from 1800 to 1945 no sustained study of these works exists. Recently, a few scholars have written on the religious novel in localized periods or on prominent religious themes, such as the Social Gospel novel or novels of the apocalypse. Little is known, however, about this extraordinarily large body of literature: how these novels altered or sustained readers’ faith; transformed doctrine or faith practices of ordinary individuals; or sustained a middle class falling from Sabbath attendance. By categorizing and analyzing these novels in their historical and religious contexts, this study contextualizes how Americans viewed faith, belief, morality, other religion groups, and political commitment across time.

ACLS Fellowship Program 2004
Professor Jackson has been designated an ACLS/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Junior Faculty Fellow.
Assistant Professor
Department: English
University of Arizona
A Democracy of Emotions: Psychologies of Reading and the Hermeneutics of Engagement in Nineteenth-Century American Narrative

This project explores how 19th-century religious activism helped Americans form political and social communities during a century when slavery, secession, immigration, industrialization, and urbanization shattered long-standing mechanisms of social cohesion. Each chapter explores how humanism and emerging evangelical technologies nurtured socio-religious awakenings that included old and new oral and visual literary forms. Modes of religious experience generated formal innovations of literary realism, such as the sermon hybrids I call "virtual-tour narratives" and "homiletic novels." Ultimately, my study shows how Americans created forms of civic attachment based not on the abtract, impersonal norms of nationality but on local, personal and religious connections of community.