Rate My Professor Thomas Koenigs

Thomas Koenigs is Associate Professor of English at Scripps College, where he joined the faculty in 2014. He holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. In the English Department, which he chairs, Koenigs teaches courses such as Readings in American Literature, American Women Writers, The Slave Narrative and the Novel of Slavery, The Early American Novel, Melville and Douglass, and American Modernism. He also leads senior seminars on Antebellum Literature and Popular Culture and Theory of the American Novel, and teaches in the Core Curriculum, including Becoming Someone in American Culture.

Koenigs teaches and writes about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, with a particular focus on prose fiction and the novel. His research interests encompass Nineteenth-Century American Literature, African-American Literature, the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century, History of the Novel, Novel Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Historicism, and American Modernism. He is the author of Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States (Princeton University Press, 2021), selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2022 by Choice Reviews. The book examines competing varieties of fictionality in early U.S. texts from 1789 to 1861, challenging traditional narratives of the novel's rise. Articles by Koenigs have appeared in ELH, American Literary History, American Literature, Early American Literature, J19, ESQ, and The Journal of American Studies, including 'A Wild and Ambiguous Medium: Democracy, Interiority, and the Early American Novel.' He co-edited a special issue of Early American Literature on Early American Fictionality. Currently, he is writing a book on representations of thought and interiority in U.S. fiction prior to the late nineteenth century. Koenigs received Mary W. Johnson Faculty Achievement Awards for teaching (2014-15 and 2018-19) and research (2015-16 and 2019-2020). He recently presented 'Natural Histories of the Heart': Fiction, Racial Interiority and the Revolutionary Legacy in the Antebellum Struggle Over Slavery at Brown University’s Fictions of the American Revolution symposium.