College of Arts and Sciences

Assistant Professor of English
Phone: (239)590-7504
E-Mail: dharriso@fgcu.edu
Office: RH 215

Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis, 2005
A.M., Washington University in St. Louis, 2001
B.A., University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1998

Primary Teaching Areas: American Literature and Culture before 1900, American religious thought and psychology

Other interests: contemporary evangelical culture and theology, gospel music and culture, sexuality and gender

Professor Harrison joined the faculty of Florida Gulf Coast University in 2006 after a post-doctoral fellowship at Washington University. His main teaching and research interests include the literature and culture of America before 1900 and the half-life of early American thought and writing. His recent articles have focused on Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Shepard and the strategies these writers developed to make traditional ideas about religion and redemption responsive to individual and cultural crises of relevance. Work currently in progress focuses on Edwards and contemporary evangelicalism and the cultural function of gospel music in evangelical Protestantism. In addition to working in his primary field, Professor Harrison also cultivates an interest in academic technology – he was the founding director of the Hurst Digital Archive at Washington University (http://artsci.wustl.edu/~hurst/) – and writes for magazines and websites about gospel music and culture.

Publications

• “Why Southern Gospel Music Matters.” Religion and American Culture. 18.1 (Winter 2008).
• “Thomas Shepard, Experiential Theology, and the Inscrutability of the Calvinist God.” (under review, Writing the Divine: Meetings of Gods and Humans)
• “On Being a Blogademic: Scholarly Voice and Professional Identity in the Internet Age.” (under review, Thought and Action)
• “No Body There: Notes on the Queer Migration to Cyberspace.” Journal of Popular Culture. (forthcoming, summer 2008)
• “The Will in Contemporary Evangelicalism: Or How (Not) To Domesticate Jonathan Edwards.” Journal of the M/MLA. 39.1 (Spring 2006). 1-13.
• “Narcissism, Apocalypse, and Shelley’s Critique of Canonical History in ‘Alastor.’” Essays in Romanticism, Spring 2003, pp 37-64.
• “The Long Poem of Walking: Spatial Organization and Pedestrian Speech Acts in ‘Piers Plowman.’” AntiThesis 12, Spring 2002, pp 192-217.