People

Brian Connolly

Associate Professor and Department Chair

CONTACT information and cv

Office: SOC 210
Phone: 813.974.2807
Fax: 813.974.6228
Email: bconnolly@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Rutgers, 2007

TEACHING

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the nineteenth-century United States, history of gender and sexuality, intellectual and cultural history, history of higher education, theory of history, and race in the Atlantic World. All of my courses are pedagogically organized around an interdisciplinary approach that builds on the intersections of history, literary criticism, and anthropology. They aim to explore the conditions of creating critical history, navigating the complicated connections between past and present.

RESEARCH

My research spans a wide array of topics in the history of the nineteenth-century United States; sexuality, kinship, and race; psychoanalysis; and critical theory. My book, entitled Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America, looks at a series of discourses, including theology, phrenology, law, anti- and proslavery writing, and ethnography in order to approach the problem of incest for the autonomous individual of liberalism. I have publishing articles and essays in both scholarly and more popular venues, including Feminist Theory, History of the Present, J19, Journal of the Early Republic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, and The Immanent Frame, as well as several edited volumes. I am currently working on two book projects. The first is a history of sovereignty and kinship in the 19th-century United States, tentatively entitled Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Nineteenth-Century United States. The second, a collection of linked essays on psychoanalysis and contemporary culture, is entitled The Age of the Phallus.

I am also a founding editor of the journal History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, which is published by Duke University Press.