We were pleased to welcome our keynote speaker for the 2010 SASCOL event, Mark Noble. Mark Noble is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His work includes articles on the role of nineteenth-century science in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and classical materialism in Walt Whitman’s poetry. His research and teaching interests also include the history of religion in America, the philosophy of science, critical theory, and American pragmatism.
Dr. Noble's title for his talk is "The Classroom in Poe's 'The Man of the Crowd.'" His paper explores how "the ways in which the texts in question (especially Poe and Melville) model classrooms," in the challenges both to students newly introduced to the material and the instructors of those students. Dr. Noble has found this topic "compelling both as someone developing courses at the beginning of a career and as someone frequently in conversation with grad students about whether and why to teach canonical texts." Dr. Noble received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2001 and his doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University in 2009. He is currently at work on a book project, The American Atom: Materiality and Poetic Vocation from Whitman to Stevens, which examines poetry and philosophy from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that rethinks personhood using the terms of both contemporary science and classical materialism.
Selected Publications:
"Whitman's Atom and the Crisis of Materiality in the Early Leaves of Grass." American Literature 81.2 (2009): 253-279.
"Emerson's Atom and the Matter of Suffering." Nineteenth-Century Literature 64.1 (2009): 16-47.
Our thanks go to Dr. Noble for giving us permission to reproduce the biography posted on his faculty page.
