Professor Milder has published widely on mid-19th century American writers. His primary teaching interests are the American Renaissance and the literature of New England, but he also offers courses in Anglo-American Romanticism, 20th century American literature, and Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.
Professor Milder has published widely on mid-19th Century American writers. He is the author of Reimagining Thoreau (1995), Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (2006), and Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life (2013), and co-editor, with Randall Fuller, of The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks (2009). Essays and chapters of his have appeared in The New England Quarterly, American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, ESQ, The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists, The Cambridge Companion to Melville, The Cambridge Companion to Emerson, and The Oxford Historical Guide to Herman Melville. Recent writings include published essays on John Updike, Philip Roth, and Alice Munro and two books-in-progress, Emerson and the Fortunes of Godless Religion and “Real Life”: John Updike and Alice Munro. Primary teaching interests are 19th century American literature, autobiography, and autobiographical fiction.