Carole Lynn Stewart

English Language & Literature

Associate Professor
PhD University of Victoria

Areas of Specialization

Carole Lynn Stewart is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. Prior to her appointment at Brock University she was Assistant Professor of American literature at the Unviersity of Maryland. She also taught for several years at the University of Calgary. She teaches and researches American and African American literatures and cultures, as well as literary theory. Her work is interdisciplinary, incorporating aspects of literary and political theory, history, and particularly religious history. Her first book, Strange Jeremiahs: Civil Religion and the Literary Imaginations of Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville, and W. E. B. Du Bois (University of New Mexico), addresses the meaning of civil religion from a literary perspective, and delves into debates about the correlative problematic of founding public space in a revolutionary democracy. Her current research explores transnational discourses of temperance and abolition in the works of nineteenth century African American and American authors.

Selected recent publications

Strange Jeremiahs: Civil Religion and the Literary Imaginations of Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville and W. E. B. Du Bois (University of New Mexico Press, February 2011)

"'The Quintessence of Sanctifying Grace'--Amanda Smith's Religious Experience, Freedom, and a Temperate Cosmopolitanism" (Journal of Africana Religions, Penn State, forthcoming)

"Civil Society," Vocabulary for the Study of Religion, Kocku von Stuckrad and Robert Segal, eds (Brill), forthcoming.

"Phillis Wheatley," The Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, Ed. Mark Spencer (New York: Continuum), forthcoming.

"A Transnational Temperance Discourse? William Wells Brown, Creole Civilization, and Temperate Manners" (The Journal of Transnational American Studies, JTAS, Vol.3; 1, 2011, 25pps.) online. American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, UC Santa Barbara.

 “Civil Religion, Civil Society and the Performative Life and Work of W. E.B. Du Bois.” (The Journal of Religion. The University of Chicago, 2008, 88: 307-330).

"Slave to the Bottle and the Plough: The Inner and Outer Worlds of Freedom in George Moses Horton's Poetry," Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 22/1 (Fall 2007): 45-64.

 Ci"" "Civil Religion in the United States” (Encyclopedia Of Religion, Second Edition [Ed., Lindsay Jones; Mircea Eliade 1^st Ed.] New York: Macmillan, 2005. 1812-1817, 5400 words). 

“The Shifting Nature of Reform Envisioned on the Mississippi Steamer: Exchanges, Masks and Charities in Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man,” in New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana   Purchase, ed. Richard J. Callahan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008, 109-129. (Double publication, slight variations in Explorations: The Twentieth-Century, The Levi Humanities Series, The University of Louisiana, Vol. XI, 2009: 107-132).

"Challenging Liberal Justice: The Talented Tenth Revisited." Recognizing Du Bois in the 21^st Century. Eds. Chester J. Fontenot and Mary Keller (Mercer UP, March, 2007), 112-141.