Rate My Professor Philip Gould

Philip Gould is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English in the Literature faculty at Brown University. He received his B.A. in History from Brown University in 1983, M.A. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988, and Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993. Gould began his academic career as a Visiting Professor of English at DePaul University from 1992 to 1994 and Assistant Professor of English at Oakland University from 1994 to 1996. He joined Brown University in 1996 as Assistant Professor of English, advancing to Associate Professor in 2000, full Professor in 2002, Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres from 2012 to 2016, and Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English since 2016. He served as Chair of the English Department from 2012 to 2018 and held roles such as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2000 to 2003 and Director of the Honors Program in Literature from 2002 to 2003.

Gould's research focuses on early American literature and culture, transatlantic theory and history, antebellum American literature and politics, relations between literature and culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British America, the early American republic, American historical fiction, antislavery writing, and loyalist perspectives on the American Revolution. His key publications include War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North (Oxford University Press, 2024), Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (Oxford University Press, 2013; finalist for the Society of Early Americanists Book Prize), Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2003), and Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 1996; paperback 2005). He has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and “Genius in Bondage”: The Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (University Press of Kentucky, 2001). Awards include Fellow of the American Antiquarian Society since 2006, American Antiquarian Society Fellowship (2000), William A. Dyer Jr. Chair in the Humanities (1997-1999), and several honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gould has served on editorial boards for American Literary History (2003-present), Early American Literature (2004-2009), and Eighteenth-Century Studies (2020-2023), and as a council member of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. He teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, the American Revolution, the early republic, Civil War literature, and authors such as Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, and Dickinson.