Benjamin Reiss (Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1997) specializes in 19th-century American literature and culture, with strong interests in popular culture, medicine, race, disability, and environmental issues. He is currently an editor of the Cambridge History of the American Novel, a collection of seventy new essays by leading scholars due to be published in 2009.

Reiss’ first book, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (Harvard UP, 2001) reconstructed P.T. Barnum's 1835-‘36 exhibit of an elderly African American woman who claimed to be 161 years old and the former nurse of the infant George Washington. It used the story to shed light on popular debates about race and national identity in the pre-Civil War American north as they arose in the nation’s earliest mass media. His new book, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2008), explores the connections between early psychiatric institutions and cultural currents in the nineteenth century. The first part focuses on cultural activities such as theatrical performances, literary exercises, formal education, and religious worship that were an important part of the treatment of the mentally ill from approximately 1830-1870. The second half considers how popular and literary writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Packard, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Herman Melville responded to the emergence of these institutions in their work and in their lives.

Professor Reiss teaches courses in traditional literary periods (such as the Nineteenth-Century American Novel and Antebellum American Literature), as well as courses that blend literary analysis with cultural studies, cultural and social history, and the history of medicine and disability. These include Literature and Madness; Slavery in American Literature and Culture; Freaks, Monsters, and Curiosities; Hawthorne and History; and Literature and the Environment. Reiss has also taught at Tulane University, and he is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, and the Louisiana Board of Regents.