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 (Georgia, 2008), tracked the ways in which that the invention of the camera transformed the way American writers conceived of the limits and the purpose of representation. His second, Henry James and the Promise of Fiction (Cambridge, 2023) argued that James remade the moral landscape of the nineteenth century novel by rethinking what a promise is and how it works.
Burrows's essays have appeared in a range of edited collections 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.
