David A. Zimmerman
Elizabeth Ritzmann Professor of English
He/him/his
Helen C. White Hall, Rm. 7185
Biography
Research Interests
19th- and 20th-century U.S. literature, with an emphasis on the 19th-c. American novel; economics and literature; moral philosophy and narrative
Degrees and Institutions
- PhD, University of California, Berkeley 2000
- M.Ed., George Washington University, 1992
- BA, Yale University, 1986
Recent Publications
Complicity and the Antebellum Moral Imagination (2026)
“Structure, Network, Apocalypse: The Complicity Fiction of George Lippard.” J19 6:2 (Spring 2018)
“Complicity, Restorative Justice, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn.” Arizona Quarterly 72:3 (Winter 2016)
Courses Taught
“Thomas Pynchon”; “The American Novel after 1965”; “Imagining Apocalypse”; “Time Travel” (a.k.a. Introduction to American and British Literature aftter 1900); “Counterfeits, Passers, and Posers” (a.k.a. Introduction to American and British Literature after 1900); “Monsters and Ghosts” (a.k.a. Introduction to American and British Literature before 1900); “Enchanted Objects” (a.k.a. Introduction to American and British Literature after 1900); “Misfits and Mass Culture” (a.k.a. Introduction to Modern American Literature); “The American Novel before 1914”; “American Literary Naturalism”; “American Literary Gothic”; “Crane, London, Dreiser”; “Wharton, Jewett, Norris”; “Modern American Literature and the Scripting of Everyday Life.” Graduate seminars: “Literature Pedagogy”; “American Capitalism and its Discontents”; “Literature and Blame”; “Conspiracy and 19th-Century American Literature”; “American Literature and the Marketplace before 1914.”
Other
Prof. Zimmerman writes songs about the literature he teaches and performs them for his lecture students. Here are a few of them. Take a listen!
Entropy’s Daughter (on The Crying of Lot 49)
I’ll Pass (on Dracula)
Blessings (based on the Ron Wallace poem, “Blessings,” with his permission)
Zimmerman writes pop songs, too. Here are a few.
The Big Bailout (on the 2008 financial crisis)
Books
Complicity and the Antebellum Moral Imagination
Zimmerman, David A. Complicity and the Antebellum Moral Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2026.
By what routes and on what grounds do moral blame and shame for social wrongs fall on individuals, groups, and institutions? To answer this question is necessarily to excite the moral imagination, to envision our moral connection to social, economic, and political harms that may appear remote or opaque. Between 1830 and 1860, American religious authorities, novelists, abolitionists, market activists, and political insiders trained this imagining. They depicted how moral complicity radiated across urban social networks, criminal conspiracies, political structures, and economic systems. In this original study, David Zimmerman illuminates how new conceptions of moral complicity and participatory sin emboldened activists, animated new literary forms, sparked political controversy, and seeded a plan to racially transfigure the Atlantic economy.
Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction
Zimmerman, David A.“Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction.” 2006: n. pag. Print.
A Nota Bene selection of The Chronicle of Higher Education During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. Fiction writers published scores of novels in the period that explored this new cultural phenomenon. In Panic!, David A. Zimmerman studies how American novelists and their readers imagined–and in one case, incited–market crashes and financial panics. Panic! examines how Americans’ attitudes toward securities markets, popular investment, and financial catastrophe were entangled with their conceptions of gender, class, crowds, corporations, and history. Zimmerman investigates how writers turned to mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy discourse to understand not only how financial markets worked, but also how mass acts of financial reading, including novel reading, could trigger economic disaster and cultural chaos. In addition, Zimmerman shows how, by concentrating on markets in crisis, novelists were able to explore the limits of fiction’s aesthetic, economic, and ethical capacities. With readings of canonical as well as lesser-known novelists, Zimmerman provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of the relation between fiction and financial modernity.