Timothy Helwig

Timothy Helwig is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English & Journalism at WIU. He earned a B.A. in English at Gettysburg College in 1992, an M.A. in English at Miami University of Ohio in 1997, and a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2006.

His dissertation, Race, Nativism, and the Making of Class in Antebellum City-Mysteries, analyzes the construction of white working-class identity in popular fiction and the penny press of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. His recent research focuses on cross-racial sympathy and class protest in the early labor and black presses. He has published an article in American Studies Journal (Fall/Winter 2006) and an article in American Periodicals (Fall 2009). He received a research fellowship for this work from the American Antiquarian Society (2005).

Timothy’s recent undergraduate courses include introduction to American literature and American Gothic Fiction. In the fall of 2009 he will be teaching a course in 19^th-Century American literature that will focus on how canonical and popular authors responded to the effects of industrialization prior to the Civil War. Texts will include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and George Thompson’s City Crimes.

Timothy’s recent graduate course focused on representations of class and racial/ethnic identity in literature of the American city.