Jeffrey Hammond

Biography

Jeffrey Hammond, George B. and Wilma Reeves Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of English, began his career as a specialist in early American literature, with particular interest in the literature and culture of the New England Puritans. In his writing courses Professor Hammond encourages students to discover social, cultural, and artistic significance in their real lives and their actual experience of the world. In his literature courses he stresses the historical “otherness” of the past, thereby encouraging students to see that other people (past and present) can see the world very differently from how modern Westerners see it.He has published three scholarly books in this field: Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 1993), Edward Taylor: Fifty Years of Scholarship and Criticism (Camden House, 1993), and The American Puritan Elegy (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He has published some seventy creative essays in respected journals and magazines, including The American Scholar, Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Ohio Magazine, River Styx, Sport Literate, Cream City Review, and Hotel Amerika. His work has won two Pushcart Prizes, Shenandoah's Carter Prize for Essay, and the Missouri Review Editors' Prize for Essay. His books of literary nonfiction include Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern (Kent State University Press, 2002), This Place Where We Are (St. Mary’s Press, 2006), Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age (Kent State University Press, 2008), and Little Big World: Collecting Louis Marx and the American Fifties (University of Iowa Press, 2010).