Dr. Carl Ostrowski
Associate Professor

Member, Graduate Faculty

Office: PH 330; Phone/Voice Mail: 904-8278

Dr. Ostrowski earned the Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina. A specialist in American literature, he joined the English Department in the Fall of 1999. He is the 2007 recipient of the Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award for Books, Maps, and Politics: a Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783-1861 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).  This award is presented every third year to recognize the best book written in English in the field of library history, including the history of libraries, librarianship and book culture. The award bears the name of Eliza Atkins Gleason, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago.

Ostrowski's Book Published
Ostrowski Wins Award

See Publications

Conference Presentations

• "Reading Antebellum Reprint Culture into Poe's Fiction." American Literature Association 2007 Conference. Boston, MA, May 2007. Panel sponsored by the Poe Studies Association.
• “Inside the Temple of Ravoni: George Lippard’s Anti-Exposé.” American
  Literature Association 2006 Conference, San Francisco, CA, May 2006.
• “Henry Box Brown and the City Mysteries Novel.” American Literature Association 2004 Conference, San Francisco, CA, May 2004.
• "'Fated to Perish by Consumption': The Political Economy of Arthur Mervyn. "American Literature Association 2003 Conference, Cambridge, MA, May 2003.
• "The Library of Congress and American Imperialism in the 1840s." Library History Conference Sponsored by The Library Company of Philadelphia, The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, and Princeton University, Philadelphia, PA, April 2002.
• “Setting Priorities at the Library of Congress: An Analysis of the 1812 Catalog.” Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) 2001 Conference, Williamsburg, VA,  July 2001.
• Conspiratorial Jesuits in the Postmodern Novel: Mason & Dixon and Underworld.” American Literature Association 2000 Conference, Long Beach, CA, May2000.
• “Class and Gender Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century American Accounts of the Library of Congress.”  SHARP 1998 Conference, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, July 1998.
• “A Secular Jeremiad: Poet as Prophet in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Eighteen Hundred and  Eleven.’” Aphra Behn Society 1996 Conference, Athens, GA, October 1996.
• “Wordsworth, the Marketplace, and the Patronage Tradition of Authorship.”  SHARP 1996 Conference, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, July 1996.
• “H.G. Clarke and the Publication of Feminist Literature in Victorian England.” Philological Association of the Carolinas, Asheville, NC, March 1995.