Reading Sociable Solitude

Amy Hungerford is the Executive Vice President of Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is also Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially the period since 1945. Her monograph, Making Literature Now (Stanford, 2016) is about the social networks that support and shape contemporary literature in both traditional and virtual media. A hybrid work of ethnography, polemic, and traditional literary criticism, the book examines how those networks shape writers’ creative choices and the choices we make about reading. She is also the author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago, 2003) and Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton, 2010) and serves as the editor of the ninth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume E, “Literature Since 1945”.