Professor
Office: 506-Q Leonard Hall
Email: todd.thompson@iup.edu
Education: PhD, University of Illinois–Chicago, 2008
Research and Teaching Interests
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, literature and politics, political satire, humor studies, periodical studies
Selected Publications
Book: A Laughable Empire: The US Imagines the Pacific World, 1840-1890 (Penn State University Press, 2023).
Book: “The National Joker”: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015).
“The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021.” (With Joanne Gilbert.) Studies in American Humor 9.1 (2023): 84-177.
“‘WHY WE SHOULD ANNEX’: Reprints and Repercussions of Twain’s New York Tribune Letters on Hawai‘i.” The Mark Twain Annual 20 (2022): 53-69.
“Then and When? Teaching Cooper and Adaptation as Layered Cultural History.” Approaches to Teaching the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper. Eds. Keat Murray and Stephen Arch. (Modern Language Association Press, 2022).
“Viral Jokes and Fugitive Humor in the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reprinting.” Studies in American Humor 7.1 (Spring 2021): 61-85.
“Form: An Empire of Jokes in the American Age of Expansion.” A Cultural History of Comedy in Age of Empire. Ed. Matthew Kaiser. (Bloomsbury, 2020): 19-42.
Courses Taught:
ENGL 983 Seminar in American Literature: The Pacific Turn in Nineteenth-Century American Studies
ENGL 983 Seminar in American Literature: American Literatures: The Hemispheric Turn
ENGL 765/865 Literature as Genre: Satire and Parody
ENGL 761/861 Topics in American Literature before 1870: Periodicals, Period: Antebellum U.S. Literature in Newspapers and Magazines
ENGL 761/861 Topics in American Literature before 1870: The South Seas in the 19th Century American Imagination
ENGL 761/861 Topics in American Literature before 1870: Adapting the American Renaissance
ENGL 676 Critical Approaches to Literature
ENGL 436 Major American Authors: American Satire and Satirists, 1720-present
ENGL 202 Composition II
HNRC 102 Unit C: How Do We Understand Art?
HNRC 102 Unit D: How Do We Create and Use the Past?
IUP Awards:
IUP Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching (2022)
IUP Distinguished Faculty Award for Research (2017)
IUP Center for Teaching Excellence Instructional Technology Award (2024)
IUP Center for Teaching Excellence Content Pedagogy Award (2017)
IUP Center for Teaching Excellence Innovation Award (2013)
External research awards and fellowships:
Last Fellow, American Antiquarian Society (2024)
Norton-Strange Townshend Week-Long Fellowship, Clements Library, University of Michigan (2024)
Center for Mark Twain Studies, Quarry Farm Fellowship (2019, 2024)
Peterson Fellow, American Antiquarian Society (2017)