Alan Ackerman

Alan Ackerman is Professor of English and Associate Director, PhD, for the Graduate Department of English at the University of Toronto.  He has authored and edited numerous books in a wide range of subjects, from American literary history to modern drama, film to free speech, rhetoric to theories of genre.  At the core of these diverse areas of study is an interest in the world-making and world-breaking powers of liberalism.  Ackerman’s most recent book, Energy and Economy in American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2026), is a history of industrial and cultural revolution that illuminates the formation of a new idiom of energy and economy in nineteenth-century America.  From 2005 to 2015, he served as editor of the quarterly journal Modern Drama.  Ackerman is also a poet and a teacher of innovative courses on trees and literature.

Publications

Books Authored

Energy and Economy in American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2026.

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. 

Co-Author with Toby Zinman, Susan C. W. Abbotson, Stephen Marino, A Student Handbook to the Plays of Arthur Miller, Enoch Brater, ed. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013.

The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Books and Journals Edited

Co-editor with Magda Romanska, Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism. London: Bloomsbury, 2016

Editor of the journal Modern Drama (Est. 1958, 4 issues per year), 2005-2015. 

Editor, Reading Modern Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Editor, Broken Glass by Arthur Miller. Student Critical Edition. London: Methuen, 2011.

Co-editor with Martin Puchner, Against Theater: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Selected Essays

 “Apocalyptic Rumblings: Catharine E. Beecher’s Domestic Economy and Environmentalism,” American Literature (2022) 94 (4): 623–650.

“Edith Wharton’s Resource Aesthetics and the Dawn of the American Energy Crisis,” Journal of American Studies (2019) 53 (4): 925 - 952.

“Lessons of C.K. Williams’s ‘Life.’”  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2018) 25 (4): 681–699.

“Electricity.”  Fueling Culture.  Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

“Comedy, Capitalism, and a Loss of Gravity.”  Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.  Spring, 2014 (36:2), 139-175.

“An Experiment in Teaching: Pygmalion, My Fair Lady and the Pursuit of Happiness.”Shakespeare and Modern Drama. Katherine Scheil, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 2011), 235-256.

“Lifeboats Cut Adrift: Eugene O’Neill in 1912” A New Literary History of America. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds.  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 512-517.

“At Home in Exile: Finding America in Casablanca and Camino Real.” Theatre and Exile in America. Yana Meerzon and Silvija Jestrovic, eds. (New York; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 158-176.

“A Spirit of Giving in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Essays in Honour of Alexander Leggatt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 110-125.

“Freedom and Form in The Importance of Being Earnest.”  MLA Approaches to Teaching Oscar Wilde.  Philip E. Smith II, ed. (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008), 142-150.

“The Spirit of Toys: Resurrection and Redemption in Toy Story and Toy Story 2.” University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 4, Fall, 2005, 895-912.

“Infelicities of Form in Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett.”  Journal of American Drama and Theater. Winter 2004. 50-68.

“Samuel Beckett’s spectres du noir: The Being of Painting and the Flatness of Film.”  Contemporary Literature. Volume 44, Number 3, Fall 2003. 399-441.

“The Dysfunctional Families of Jacksonian Melodrama.”  Arizona Quarterly.  Volume 59, Number 3, Autumn 2003. 31-68.

“Visualizing Hamlet’s Ghost: The Spirit of Modern Subjectivity.”  Theatre Journal 53:1, March 2001: 119-144.

“Louisa May Alcott and the Theatre of Private Life.”  Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 162-185.

“The Right to Privacy: William Dean Howells and the Rise of Dramatic Realism.”  American Literary Realism 30:1, Fall 1997: 1-19.