Patricia Roylance received her B.A. from Harvard University in 1998, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2005. Her teaching and research interests include early Americas literature and culture; nationalism, transnationalism and comparative colonialisms; geography; temporality and history; and print culture and the history of the book. Her book, Eclipse of Empires: World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2013), examines anxious U.S. attitudes toward the failed empires of Italy, Peru, Spain, the Netherlands and Native America. She is currently at work on a second book, tentatively titled The Timescapes of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Media, which tracks the shifting meanings of cultural artifacts such as John Winthrop’s Journal and the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as they move through varying media forms.

Professor Roylance is willing to supervise graduate projects dealing with early American literature and culture, American literature and culture more generally, transnationalism and colonialism, material culture and the history of the book.