S.J.H. (Spencer) Morrison

I am a specialist in modern and contemporary American literature and interdisciplinary American Studies, with a particular focus on U.S. culture in the immediate post-WWII decades. The writers on whom I have published include high modernists (William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf), canonical mid-century figures (James Baldwin, Delmore Schwartz, Paule Marshall, John Berryman), and some of the foremost U.S. authors of recent times (Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Colson Whitehead).

My book The Art of Responsibility: Mid-Century American Fiction and the Birth of Foreign Aid (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) explores how American writers from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s represented America's altered role in global affairs after World War II as a giver of widescale, state-based foreign aid. Aside from The Art of Responsibility, I have published articles in a range of journals and essay collections, including ELH, American Literary History, and American Literature. In my home country of Canada, I have contributed reviews and essays to its major review of books (Literary Review of Canada) and newspaper of record (The Globe & Mail).