Title

Professor
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts

E-mail

gcamfield@ucmerced.edu

Office Phone

(209) 233-1072

Website

faculty1.ucmerced.edu/gcamfield

Address

University of California, Merced
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, CA 95343

Research Interests

Professor Camfield has published widely on American literature and culture — from 18^th century poet Joel Barlow to the television cartoon Beavis and Butt-Head. Mostly he has worked on the ethical and esthetic debates of the nineteenth-century, concentrating on the works of Mark Twain, American literary humor, literary sentimentalism and domesticity. These perspectives inform his three books:

• Sentimental Twain: Mark Twain in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Pennsylvania, 1994)
• Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford, 1997)
• The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain (2003)

Currently he is carrying forward the implications of the second book in a study of what new discoveries in neuroscience can tell us about how people respond to literature and other complex artistic representations.

Education

• PhD, 1989 — University of California, Berkeley
• A.B., 1980 — Brown University