Stephanie Hawkins Ph.D.

Stephanie Hawkins specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture. The author of American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2010), her scholarly work focuses on the interface between public attitudes, literary and visual representation, and institutional rhetorics. Her essays on American modernism have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, The Henry James Review, Arizona Quarterly, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. More recently, Dr. Hawkins's research interests have expanded to include neuroscience, religious experience, and the psychology of pubic opinion. Her current book project, provisionally titled Manufacturing Dissent: Mind and the Politics of Conversion in American Modernism, argues that aesthetic resistance to social scientific efforts to shape public opinion--and otherwise convert the masses--in the first half of the twentieth century illuminates the political stakes of contemporary neuroscience concerning the "plastic" brain and the role of art in cultural transformation. She has published articles drawn from this project in the scientific journal Frontiers in Physiology and in the essay collection Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience (Springer, 2014).