Benjamin “Josh” Doty, Ph.D.

19th-century American literature
Literature and medicine
Digital humanities

Benjamin “Josh” Doty teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature before 1900, medical humanities and critical theory. His research examines science and medicine in nineteenth-century American literature. Doty traces the local circuits by which medical ideas reached readers — popular periodicals, lyceum lectures, reformist tracts, public clinics — and the ways literature gives those ideas imaginative form.

Doty’s first book, The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature (UNC Press, 2020), argues that nineteenth-century literary texts naturalized and critiqued emerging medical regimes, shaped readers’ sense of moral responsibility for their bodies and provided a shared vocabulary for debating medical authority. His current research turns to American Gothic literature and the history of physiology to theorize literature’s embodied effects, or what nineteenth-century readers called “sensations.” Drawing on medical treatises, literary periodicals and reader testimony, Doty argues that American Gothic texts affirm the embodied experience of reading by quickening the pulse and thrilling the nerve.

In his teaching, Doty designs interdisciplinary assignments that ask students to put literary knowledge into action. Students in his classes have presented at local symposia, written Wikipedia articles on overlooked authors and created digital scholarly editions of works such as María Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885). These projects demonstrate the continuing salience of English studies to everyday life.

Doty has served as the Department Chair of English Literature and Language since 2022, and is the founding director of St. Mary’s Medical Humanities program and the Associate Dean for Student Matters in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

“Charles Darwin’s Colors: Science, Subjectivity, and Representation.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 90, no. 3, 2025, pp. 71-90.

“Health and Illness in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Approaches to Teaching Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by Lynn Domina. Modern Language Association, 2024, pp. 62-67.

“Melville.” American Literary Scholarship: An Annual 2020, edited by David J. Nordloh, Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 37-45.

“C19, Covid-19, and Conferencing.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, special issue on “Nineteenth-Century Scholars Respond to a Twenty-First Century Pandemic,” vol. 67, no. 1, 2021, pp. 236-45.

The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

“Fourierism and Nervous Sympathy in The Blithedale Romance.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 45.1 (Spring, 2019): 26-45.

“Digesting Moby-Dick.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 19.1 (Spring, 2017): 85-101.

“Satire, Minstrelsy, and Embodiment in Sheppard Lee.” Early American Literature 51.1 (Spring, 2016): 131-156.

“William Faulkner’s Embodied Subjectivities.” Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity. Ed. Donald Wehrs. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013. 111-131.