Michael Everton

Areas of interest

My research focuses on 19th-century American literature and book history, especially the history of publishing and copyright. I’ve held fellowships at the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Bibliographical Society of America, and my articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Legacy, ESQ, Style, and the New England Quarterly, as well as in edited collections, including Edgar Allan Poe in Context. My first book, The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and my edition of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor was published by Broadview in 2016. With Robert Spoo (Princeton University), I’m currently finishing a new book on the “courtesy of the trade,” the informal intellectual property norm that structured 19th-century American and British (and even Canadian) publishing in the absence of international copyright, and I’ve also been writing recently on religion and postsecularism in the early U.S. I’m one of the general editors of the new Broadview Anthology of American Literature.

I teach primarily pre-20th-century American literature and book history, though I sometimes drift into later periods and other traditions as well. In Fall 2024 I’m teaching a graduate-level introduction to book history (Engl. 820) and an undergraduate course on Moby-Dick (Engl. 437W). In the Spring I’m teaching two upper-level undergraduate courses, one on poetry, painting, and intermediality (Engl. 363), and one on histories, theories, and practices of reading, in which we read everything from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to Mark L. Danielewski’s House of Leaves to Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (Engl. 415W).

Education

• BA (Honours), James Madison University (Virginia)
• MA, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill