Kenyon Gradert

Assistant Professor

Howard College of Arts and Sciences

English

206 Russell Hall

Kenyon Gradert teaches in Samford’s English and Core Texts (Great Books) programs, with interests spanning from the Reformation to the present. His research focuses on memory and reception in long 19th-century social criticism, particularly how American and European writers from 1789 to 1914 reimagined older texts and traditions to address emerging crises —slavery, secularism, revolution, and the environment. His first book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020), explores how abolitionists reclaimed the Puritans. He is currently working on two books: one on higher criticism’s impact on 19th-century literature, another on Melville’s global revival after WWI.

His scholarly writing appears in MELUS, African American Review, The New England Quarterly, and others. Recent essays include Don Quixote’s reception among German Romantics and Romanticism's reception among Black abolitionists. His public writing has run in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, The Baffler, and LA Review of Books, covering topics from abolitionists' reception of Charles Darwin to postwar Germans' reception of Billy Graham.

At Deep Springs College, he has joined students on cattle drives in California’s high desert (his partner: a pinto named Utah). In a downtown Birmingham blacksmith studio, he co-leads “The Forge,” a shop class-meets-reading group that explores craft and aesthetics.

Degrees and Certifications

PhD Washington University in St. Louis

Awards and Fellowships

Volkswagen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Heidelberg University, Center for American Studies (2017-2018)
Teaching Awards (2014, 2017, 2019)
New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, Archival Research Fellow, 2016
Graduate Affiliate, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Washington University, 2014 - 2016

Books

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination, University of Chicago Press, “American Beginnings, 1500 – 1900” Series, April 2020

Selected Articles

“Theodore Parker and the Problem of Criticism,” invited article for special issue of ESQ, forthcoming
“The Mayflower and the Slave Ship: Pilgrim-Puritan Origins in the Antebellum Black Imagination,” MELUS,3 (Fall 2019)
“Forgotten Texts: Lorenzo Dow Blackson’s Kingdoms of Light and Darkness,” African American Review, 3 (Fall 2019)
“A Paper Puritan of Puritans: The Liberator’s Protestant Spirit in the Antebellum Public Sphere,” Journal of American Studies, 4 (Fall 2018)
“Swept into Puritanism: Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and the Roots of Radicalism,” The New England Quarterly, 90.1 (Spring 2017)
“Life Writing and Romantic Expressivism,” Handbook of American Romanticism, ed. Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr, Jan Stievermann, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021

Awards