UMass Boston

Leonard Von Morze, Assoc Prof A & Interim Dean, Honors College - Dean's Office

Leonard Von Morze

Department:
Honors College
Title:
Associate Professor A & Interim Dean
Interim Dean of the Honors College and Associate Professor of English
Location:
Wheatley Hall Floor 04
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Biography

My work focuses on topics in early American writing, especially its transatlantic dimensions. A current book project, German Fractures, traces how a non-Anglophone republicanism was transformed by the emergence of a multilingual republic in the early nineteenth century premised on both secularization and liberalism's division of public and private spheres, and explores that history's implications for English language learners in the public sphere today. A native of Northern California, I also enjoy teaching and learning about New England's environmental history. I served as Chair of the English Department from 2017 to 2021, and then enjoyed a year as a Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. As the current Interim Dean of the Honors College, I see interdisciplinary inquiry and undergraduate research as the defining aims of an Honors experience.

Area of Expertise

literature of colonial and revolutionary America and of the early republic; multilingual U.S. writing; environmental humanities

Degrees

B.A., Ph.D., University of California Berkeley

M.A., University of California Irvine

Professional Publications & Contributions
  • Co-editor, Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, vol. 2: The Monthly Magazine and Other Writings, 1789–1802. Forthcoming.
  • Co-author, "Early American Magazine Writing in and out of the Charles Brockden Brown Canon," Early American Literature 57.2 (2022): 555–62.
  • Intro. & co-ed., "Early American Women Authors Unbound," special issue of Women's Studies, 2021.
  • "The Critical Force of Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Revolution" (review essay), Early American Literature 56.1 (2021):259–272.
  • “Slavery, Abolition, and African Americans in Brown.” In The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. Oxford University Press, 2019. 302–17.
  • “Circulating the American Revolution: The Atlantic Networks of Christian Jacob Hütter.” InBeyond 1776: Globalizing the Literatures, Cultures and Communities of the American Revolution. University of Virginia Press, 2018. 25–47.
  • "An Unoriginal Modernity: The Novelist-Translator Friedrich von Oertel (1764–1807)." Edinburgh German Yearbook 18 (2018): 107–24.
  • "Postcards fromWaterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations." In Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave, 2018. 121-144.
  • "Cultural Transfer in the German Atlantic: Brown, Oertel, and the First Translation of a U.S. Novel." In Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity, 1780-1850: Subjects, Texts, and Print Culture. Routledge, 2017. 171-194.
  • Ed., Cities and the Circulation of Culture in the Atlantic World: From the Early Modern to Modernism. Palgrave, 2017.
  • "The Silkworm and the Bee: Georgia, Cognitive Mapping, and the Atlantic Labour System in Boltzius and Thomson." In The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 17–30.
  • “Christian Jacob Hütter’s Washington: An Introduction, Commentary, and Translation of the Work.”Amerikastudien/American Studies60.2/3 (2015): 293–331.
  • Intro. & co-ed., Urban Identity and the Atlantic World. Palgrave, 2013.
  • "'Self-Created Societies': Sociability and Statehood in the Pittsburgh Enlightenment. "Sociability and Cosmopolitanism: Social Bonds on the Fringes of the Enlightenment. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. 121–140.
  • "A Massachusetts Yankee in Karl Theodor's Court: Count Rumford's Sovereign Benevolence and Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond." Symbiosis 15.1 (2011): 45-61.
  • "Pitching Transatlanticism: Commerce, Race, and the Academic Marketplace." In Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. 1-19.
  • "Romantic Federalism: Atlantic Republican Literature Between Cosmopolitanism and Confederation." Literature Compass 6.6 (2009): 1127–44.
  • "Republican Centaurs." Early American Studies 4.1 (2006): 192–232.
  • Shorter work includes pieces for textbooks and encyclopedias, an essay on film pedagogy, and book reviews on Atlantic and early American topics in The Wordsworth Circle, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The New England Quarterly, The Journal of American Studies, The Journal of the Early Republic, American Literary History Online, and The Middle Ground Journal.

Additional Information
  • My recent introductory undergraduate courses have included the year-long Experiencing Boston course for first-year students, as well as the "gateway" courses for the English major, including Introductory to Literary Studies and Six American Authors. As a participant in a project funded by an NEH Connections grant, I taught courses for Environmental Studies on Writing and the Environment and the capstone on Developing Boston Harbor Across Time Scales. Recent advanced undergraduate courses include Memoir and Autobiography, Early African-American Literature, Literature and the Political Imagination, Colonial American Literature, and Literature of the Atlantic.
  • Courses for M.A. students have included Studies in Narrative, Colonial American Literature, American Romanticism, Literature of the Atlantic, and Atlantic Utopias.
  • An M.A. course taught in the Boston Public Library's Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts culminated in an exhibit, "Sermons, Slavery, and Scandal: The Printed Worlds of Early Boston, 1660 - 1830": see course exhibit catalog. More recently, I offered a course on "Doing Environmental History in Early America" at the American Antiquarian Society for undergraduates studying in the Worcester area.