Faculty profile

Douglas A. Guerra teaches courses in U.S. literature, media theory, popular culture, and the relationships between technological innovation, aesthetic form, and social arrangement. He is a founding member and current Chair of the C19 Podcast (C19: America in the 19th Century). His first book, Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America (UPenn Press 2018), won the Popular Culture Association’s Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary Source Work, and his experiments in digital pedagogy were featured as part of the C19 Society’s #TeachingC19 series. His current project explores ephemera and other marginalized media forms—stock imagery, games and toys, and procedural writing in periodicals like Godey's Lady Book—alongside figures and personages of split worlds like mermaids, vivandières, contrabands, and nurses to consider the "human infrastructures" that settled and sustained the social collectives of the American nineteenth century.