Deak Nabers studies the interactions between American literary history and the history of American social thought in a variety of its institutional and disciplinary settings--legal, sociological, economic, and military. His first book, Victory of Law, charts the cultural and literary genealogy of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Nabers is currently pursuing two book-length projects--a study of the role of World War II in the development of postmodernism in the United States, and an examination of the centrality of the corporation, as a social form, economic institution, and ideological construct, to the development of American liberalism from the Civil War to the present.

"The Novel and the Police Power," Nineteenth Century Literature 64 (June 2009): 76-109.

"The True Image of Authority," in Solon and Thespis: Renaissance Theatre and the Law, ed. Dennis Kezar. (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 264-88.

"Thoreau's Transcendental Constitution," American Literary History 19 (Winter 2007): 824-848.

"Shadows of Law: Stowe, Melville, and the Government of Liberty," Law, Culture, and the Humanities, vol. 3 (2007): 102-26.

Victory of Law: The Civil War, The Fourteenth Amendment, and American Literature, 1852-1866. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

"The Problem of Revolution in the Age of Slavery: William Wells Brown and the Chains of Liberty," Representations, vol. 91 (Summer 2005): 84-108.

"Past Using: James Baldwin and Civil Rights Law in the 1960s," Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 18, no. 2 (December 2005): 221-42.

"'Victory of LAW': Melville and Reconstruction," American Literature, vol. 75, no. 1 (March 2003): 1-30.

"Spies Like Us: British Imperialism and the Great War Spy Craze," The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2:1 (Spring 2001). [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cch/v002/2.1nabers.html].

"Realism," Blackwell's Encyclopedia of the Novel (forthcoming).

Nineteenth-century American literature; twentieth-century American literature and film; law and literature.