#  Amanda Claybaugh, Dean of Undergraduate Education 

 



   ![photo](/sites/g/files/omnuum3691/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/claybaugh/files/claybaughhs_0004smallsquare.jpg?itok=ZsrqUp_G) 

 

I received my BA in English from Yale University in 1993 and my PhD in English from Harvard University in 2001. After teaching at Columbia University for nine years, I [returned to Harvard in 2010](https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/05/amanda-claybaugh-portrait). I am on the faculty of the [English department](http://english.fas.harvard.edu/), and for four years I chaired the program in [History and Literature](https://histlit.fas.harvard.edu/).

My scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century literature and history, with a particular attention to the role that teachers and writers play in times of social change. My first book,*The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World*, was awarded the Rudikoff Prize in Victorian studies. Since then, I've continued to publish scholarly articles, but I also now write in more public venues, such as the *London Review of Books*, *Public Books,* and *n+1*. I'm currently finishing a work of narrative non-fiction, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, about the Union occupation of the South Carolina sea islands during the Civil War. To learn more about that project or about my scholarship and writing more generally, [click here](/scholarship-overview).

My teaching ranges widely, from Humanities 10 to the Gen Ed course I co-teach on the Civil War, but I find myself returning, again and again, to the novel. I teach courses on the 19th century novel, on the 21st century novel, on the historical novel, on the *Bildungsroman*. To learn more about my courses or about my teaching and advising more generally, [click here](/teaching-overview "Teaching").