Stuart Burrows teaches classes on nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction and poetry, the history of photography, film, and literary theory. His first book, A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography (2008), argued that the invention of the camera transformed the way American writers conceived of the limits and the purpose of representation. A second book, Henry James and the Promise of Fiction, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.
Henry James and the Promise of Fiction has four closely related aims: to establish the promise as the governing trope of James’s work; to map James’s refashioning of the moral landscape of the nineteenth century novel; to show the ways in which James’s reflections upon the act of promising transform our conception of moral value; to redraw the relation between morality and literature in terms of form rather than content.
Burrows's essays have appeared in a range of edited collections (most recently Melville's Philosophies) and journals such as American Literary History, boundary 2, J19, Nineteenth Century Literature, NOVEL, and Romantic Circles. Writers discussed include James Agee, Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Raymond Chandler, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Orne Jewett, and W. G. Sebald
Other projects include a book on personhood in the nineteenth century, focusing principally on the work of Herman Melville, and The Miracle of Cinema, a study of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, André Tarkovsky, and Agnes Varda.
