Benjamin ReissSamuel Candler Dobbs Professor of EnglishDirector, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry
Benjamin Reiss is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English and Director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. A faculty member at Emory since 2006, he served as chair of the Department of English from 2017-2023 and has led initiatives at Emory on public humanities, disability studies, and undergraduate curriculum development. In 2021, he was awarded the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education (Laney Graduate School). He is currently co-PI on a grant from the Teagle Foundation to develop undergraduate curricular pathways to promote humanistic thinking for students in all disciplines.
Reiss is a scholar of American literary and cultural history who specializes in nineteenth-century literature, disability studies, health humanities, and public humanities. His most recent sole-authored book, Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World (Basic Books, 2017), uses literature, history, science, and psychology to explain how our society created rules and expectations for human sleep that led to social conflicts, inequities, and pervasive worry about managing sleep. Reiss is also the author of The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Harvard University Press, 2001) and Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2008), as well as essays in journals and periodicals including American Literary History, American Literature, Social Text, ELH, American Quarterly, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Sleep, Sleep Health, the Los Angeles Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Slate. He is a co-editor of the Cambridge History of the American Novel (with Leonard Cassuto and Clare Eby, Cambridge University Press, 2011), Keywords for Disability Studies (with Rachel Adams and David Serlin, New York University Press, 2015), and A Cultural History of Sleep in the Age of Revolutions (with Ann Marie Plane, Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming.) Reiss has also taught at Tulane University, and he is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, the American Antiquarian Society, the Louisiana Board of Regents, and– of course!– Emory’s Fox Center, of which he is a proud faculty fellow alum. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
