Education

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2013

Academic Summary

Donal Harris specializes in U.S. literature from the Civil War until the present, particularly the relationship between American literature and the many social institutions that have taken part in producing, circulating, and judging it. He is the author of On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines (Columbia University Press, 2016) and essays in PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, Open Library of the Humanities, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues. His current project is a partnership with the Cossitt Branch of the Memphis Public Library to produce a multi-platform history of public libraries in the South. His work has been supported by the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Remembering George Riley at MLK50 Fund. 

Select Publications

Books

• On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines (Columbia University Press, 2016), in Modernist Latitudes Series.
• Citizens of Cossitt: The Legacies and Futures of Public Libraries in the South (in progress)

Essays

• “The Geographies of Poverty: Recession Documentary in Social Media,” Special Issue on “Binary Modernisms,” Open Library of Humanities (forthcoming)
• “Literary Magazines.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Patrick O’Donnell. Wiley- Blackwell, (forthcoming) 
•  “Time Inc.” American Literature in Transition: 1930-1940, ed. Ichiro Takayoshi. Cambridge University Press, 2018. 403-420.
•  “Getting Real: From Popular Modernism to Peripheral Realism.” After the Program Era. ed. Loren Glass. University of Iowa Press, 2017. 219-232. New American Canon series.
• "States of Literature," The Los Angeles Review of Books (September 2016).
• "The Art of Administration," The Los Angeles Review of Books (February 2016).
• "Understanding Eliot: Mass Media and Literary Modernism in the American Century." Modern Language Quarterly 76.4 (2015): 491-514.
• "Novel Protests: The New Left and Black Fiction in the 1960s." Black Writers and the Left, ed. Kristin Moriah (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013).
• "Jonestown as Genre," The Los Angeles Review of Books (November 2013).
• "Finding Work: James Agee in the Office." PMLA 127.4 (2012): 766-781.