Biography

In his historically informed teaching and scholarship, Professor David Faflik documents a modern America in the making. He relies in this work on the interpretive traditions of cultural history, book history, and cultural studies to explain how a variety of American cultural formations can be “read” as a reflection of the mindsets, practices, and world views of the people who experienced them. To this end, Faflik’s first book, Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840–1860 (2012), examines how one of the most popular sites of domestic residence in the nineteenth century, the metropolitan boardinghouse, influenced the development of city literature in the West. His second book, Melville and the Question of Meaning (2018), combines aesthetics and sociolinguistics, archival history and historical theory, political philosophy and film studies to explore the complex “meanings” of meaning in the writings of Herman Melville. In Faflik’s third book, Urban Formalism: The Work of City Reading (2020), he reprises the recent critical conversation on form to reimagine the interpretive strategies that urban dwellers brought to bear on their personal and collective experiences of life in the big city. And Faflik’s fourth book, Transcendental Heresies: Harvard and the Modern American Practice of Unbelief (2020), draws on an expansive archive of antebellum records and writings to assess how the collective spiritual questioning of the New England transcendentalists reconstituted the region’s religious sensibilities during the decades before the U.S. Civil War.

Faflik’s current work reckons with America’s past even as it engages with questions of cultural identity and critical methodology in the present tense. The ostensible topic of the first of Faflik’s forthcoming books, That Futebol Feeling: Sport and Play in Brazil’s Heartland (February 2025), is the game of “soccer” as it’s played in the interior Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where Professor Faflik served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Studies of the United States in 2022. At the same time, That Futebol Feeling weighs the propriety of play as a subject matter for students of culture, pitting Faflik’s own treatment of contemporary sports against the conventional standard of “serious” scholarship in the discipline of cultural studies today. The second of Faflik’s forthcoming books, The Literary Gift in Early America (expected Spring 2025), not only attends to the diverse ways that print and manuscript objects were circulated as “gifts” in early America; this work also speaks to the lack of critical attention that’s been paid to literary circulation as such in Americanist literary scholarship in recent decades, compared to the attention that’s afforded literary production and reception.