Katie McGettigan

Dr Katie McGettigan is Senior Lecturer in American Literature. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American and transatlantic literature and print culture. Her research interests also cover archive studies, print and popular culture from 1776 onwards, environmental humanities, and slavery and anti-slavery studies. 

Katie's second book, The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830-1860 was published by U Massachusetts Press in 2023. Through a new history of US fiction, poetry, essays and autobiography published in Britain, the book argues that British publishers and their editions of US writing were central to the invention of American literature as a distinct and national field in the years immediately before the Civil War. For this research, she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship between 2014 and 2017. 

Her first book, Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text was published by the University of New Hampshire press in December 2017. Her work has also appeared in Journal of Victorian Culture, Journal of American Studies, American Literature, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. She is currenly one of the co-editors of the Journal of American Studies. 

Katie has a keen interest in public engagement and outreach, and has discusssed her work on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and in The Conversation. She can be found on Twitter @KatieMcGettigan.

Katie is happy to take enquires about postgraduate research supervision relating to any area of her research.

• History of the Book
• American and Transatlantic Print Culture
• Nineteenth-century American literature
• Environmental Humanities
• Periodical Studies
• Herman Melville

• BA English, University of Oxford - 2009
• MSt English and American Studies, University of Oxford - 2010
• PhD in American Studies, University of Keele - 2014

• EN1101: Thinking as a Critic 
• EN1401: Introducing America 
• EN2401: The American Century
• EN2328: American Gothic