Alan Ackerman Degrees
B.A. (University of Pennsylvania), M.A., Ph.D. (Harvard University).
Alan Ackerman is a Professor of English. His primary areas of teaching are American Literature and Modern Drama. Professor Ackerman’s research interests cover a range of genres (including plays, novels, poems, autobiographies, movies, and television talk-shows) and center on cultural forms of liberalism. His studies of cultural history involve law and literature, theories of liberal education, and media history. His recent book, Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale University Press, 2011) focuses on a libel suit between celebrity authors and explores tensions between privacy and self-expression, freedom and restraint in public language. His book, Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar (University of Toronto Press, 2011), investigates the technological revolution that has changed the way we see things via the storytelling media employed by Pixar Animation Studios, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare. The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) studies the importance of theatre in the works of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, and Henry James. Ackerman is the editor of numerous books in the field of modern drama and theatre. Since 2005, he has served as Editor of the journal Modern Drama. His current research project, provisionally entitled “Comedies of Capitalism,” aims to reconsider the “genre” of economic and philosophical liberalism. Professor Ackerman holds a joint-appointment in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies.
Publications
Books Authored
Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300167122
Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. http://www.utppublishing.com/Seeing-Things-From-Shakespeare-to-Pixar.html
The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/summary/v053/53.2puchner.html
Books Edited
Reading Modern Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. http://www.utppublishing.com/_search.php?page=1&init=1&q=Reading+Modern+Drama
Miller, Arthur. Broken Glass. Student Critical Edition. London: Methuen, 2011.
Against Theater: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage, co-editor with Martin Puchner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
