Alexander Manshel

My research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, multi-ethnic American fiction, and the cultural institutions that organize the contemporary literary field. How do the people and institutions that contribute to the production, circulation, and reception of contemporary literature influence the various forms that it takes? How do they shape our sense of what is considered literary in the first place? These are just some of the questions that motivate my research. My first book, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia University Press, 2023), provides a new history of contemporary fiction that documents how the politics of historical recovery have fundamentally altered American literature and defined the canonization of writers of color. My other published writing examines the influence of literary prizes on what we read, teach, and study; the divergent representations of technology in more popular and more prestigious fiction; and the impact of new (and newly important) venues for literary experience, such as literary adaptations to television and the digital audiobook. I am currently at work on a second monograph, tentatively titled High School English: A History of American Reading.