Dean Amanda Claybaugh receieved her BA in English from Yale University in 1993 and her PhD in English from Harvard University in 2001. After teaching at Columbia University for nine years, she returned to Harvard in 2010. She is on the faculty of the English department, and for four years chaired the program in History and Literature.
Dean Claybaugh’s scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century literature and history, with a particular attention to the role that teachers and writers play in times of social change. Her first book,The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World, was awarded the Rudikoff Prize in Victorian studies. Since then, she has continued to publish scholarly articles, but also now writes in more public venues, such as the London Review of Books, Public Books, and n+1. She is currently finishing a work of narrative non-fiction, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, about the Union occupation of the South Carolina sea islands during the Civil War.
Her teaching ranges widely, from Humanities 10 to the Gen Ed course she co-teaches on the Civil War, but often find herself returning, again and again, to the novel. Dean Claybaugh teaches courses on the 19th century novel, on the 21st century novel, on the historical novel, on the Bildungsroman.
To learn more about her scholarship, writing, and teaching, view her faculty website.