Timothy Helwig

Timothy Helwig

Visting Professor, English

swipe to see more

Timothy Helwig is Visiting Professor of English at Furman University. He specializes in 19th-century American literature and antebellum print culture, with an emphasis on working-class identity and cross-racial sympathy in works by such authors as Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, George Lippard, William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, and Edgar Allan Poe. He has held visiting research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park
  • M.A., Miami University of Ohio
  • B.A., Gettysburg College

Research

Dr. Helwig's monograph Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) analyzes the shared strategies of class protest in popular and canonical texts from a range of antebellum white and African American authors. The book documents evidence of cross-racial solidarity expressed in the serial fiction, editorials, and literary reviews published in the labor press, weekly story papers, the penny press, and the early African American press during the three decades leading up to the Civil War.

Publications

  • “Whiteness and Working-Class Studies” (book chapter). Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. Jolene Hubbs, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023 (forthcoming).
  • “Three Histories of Contested Nation-Building in Early Transatlantic Print Culture” (book review article). Early American Literature 57:3 (Spring 2022): 949-965.
  • Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020.
  • “Crime and American Romanticism” (book chapter). A History of American Crime Fiction. Christopher Raczkowski, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 56-68.
  • “Melville’s Liminal Bachelor and the Making of Middle-Class Manhood in Harper’s NewMonthly Magazine.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 24:1 (Spring 2014): 1-20.
  • “Black and White Print: Cross-Racial Strategies of Class Solidarity in Mechanics’ FreePress and Freedom’s Journal.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 19:2 (Fall 2009): 117-135.
  • “Denying the Wages of Whiteness: The Racial Politics of George Lippard’s Working-Class Protest.” American Studies 47:3 (Fall-Winter 2006): 87-111.

0