Media, PA 19063
Biography
James Berkey is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Writing Studio at Penn State Brandywine. He received his PhD in English from Indiana University – Bloomington in 2010. Before coming to Brandywine, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University, where he taught writing courses on war literature and the history of Durham, North Carolina. His research and teaching interests include 19th- and 20th-Century American Literature; war literature (particularly the literature of the Civil War); print culture, periodical studies, and the history of the book; American Studies; and writing studies.
Professor Berkey is currently at work on a book-length project on the material conditions of wartime printing during the Civil War with an emphasis on the hundreds of newspapers printed and published by soldiers in the Union and Confederate armies. His project has drawn on resources from archives including the American Antiquarian Society, Boston Athenaeum, Library of Congress, U.S. Army Military History Institute, and Western Reserve Historical Society, and rare book libraries at Duke University, Emory University, and the University of North Carolina. To learn more about his scholarship, click on the Publications tab.
As the Director of the Writing Studio at Brandywine, Professor Berkey works with and mentors a staff comprised of Brandywine peer tutors and experienced professional writing tutors. Learn more about the Writing Studio by visiting http://brandywine.psu.edu/writing-studio.
Awards
2017-2020 Jane E. Cooper Memorial Faculty Fellowship, Penn State Brandywine
2013 Research Society for American Periodicals Article Prize for “Splendid Little Papers from the ‘Splendid Little War’: Mapping Empire in the Soldier Newspapers of the Spanish-American War” (2012)
Publications
“‘Latest News from Secessia’: Union Soldier-Printers and the Rebel ‘Grapevine Line,’” American Periodicals 30.1 (2020)
“Lyrical Weapons of War: The Poet’s Corner in Civil War Soldier Papers,” Mississippi Quarterly 70/71.4 (2020)
“Printed with a ‘Steal Penn’: Handwriting the Nation in Civil War Prison Newspapers,” Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image, Eds. Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan, University of Georgia Press, 2019
Guest Editor, “Special Issue: War and Periodicals,” American Periodicals 26.2 (2016)
“Traces of the Confederacy: Soldier Newspapers and Wartime Printing in the Occupied South,” Literary Cultures of the Civil War, Ed. Timothy Sweet, University of Georgia Press, 2016
“Splendid Little Papers from the ‘Splendid Little War’: Mapping Empire in the Soldier Newspapers of the Spanish-American War,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 3.2 (2012)
“Empire’s Mastheads: Rewriting the ‘Correspondents’ War’ from the Edge of Empire,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.2 (2011)