Ben Bascom

Ben Bascom arrives in Morgantown after a career at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where he taught early and nineteenth-century American literatures and LGBTQIA+ literatures and cultures. His book, Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (Oxford UP, 2024), tells an alternative account about the early US through focusing on outsiders who desired to belong but faced a series of exclusions that rendered their lives queer. This work pivots from a canon-focused literary corpus to plumb instead the rich and compelling archives and ephemera of neglected life stories. After having finished this project, he has entered the beginning stages of a second book project that considers the relationship between what today gets called “mental health” and sexuality. This project provides a back history, for example, of how itinerant medicine and science in the nineteenth century shaped the way people accessed their bodies and their pleasures in ways similar to contemporary pop cultural self-help personality books.

Dr. Bascom’s other academic interests include affect and queer theories, visual culture and material text studies, psychoanalysis, and performance art. He plans to further grow his interests in environmental humanities and disability studies.

As an avid and innovative teacher, Dr. Bascom thinks of the classroom as a space to explore ideas in collaborative and collective environments. He currently serves on the editorial boards of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and American Literary History, and he has published essays and book reviews in those journals in addition to Early American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, American Literature, among others. He is the incoming co-editor with Christopher Hanlon (Arizona State University) of American Literary History Review (Oxford UP) and looks forward to providing WVU graduate students with opportunities to engage with editorial work.