Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- American Literature
- Environmental Humanities
Biography
Alan Ackerman is a Professor of English. He is the author Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale University Press, 2011); Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar (University of Toronto Press, 2011); and The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). His current research is in the field of environmental humanities and focuses on literary and cultural aspects of the rise of fossil fuels as a major energy source in the nineteenth century. Essays from this project include “Apocalyptic Rumblings: Catharine Beecher’s Domestic Economy and Environmentalism” (American Literature, Dec. 2022) and “Edith Wharton’s Resource Aesthetics and the Dawn of the American Energy Crisis” (Journal of American Studies, Nov. 2019). Professor Ackerman also teaches and writes about trees and what trees can teach us about our place in the world. As a poet, he contributed to the 2022 volume, Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees, edited by Christine Lowther. He is the editor of numerous books in the field of modern drama and theatre. From 2005 to 2015, he served as Editor of the journal Modern Drama.
Publications
Books Authored
Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.
The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Books Edited
Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, co-editor with Magda Romanska. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Reading Modern Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
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.