Assistant Professor of English
Phone: (239)590-7504
E-Mail: dharriso@fgcu.edu
Office: RH 133

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 American religious literature and culture and the half-life of early American thought and writing in subsequent eras. His current book project explores the cultural function of southern (white) gospel music. In addition to working in his primary fields, 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, including at his own blog, www.averyfineline.com. He is the winner of the National Education Association’s 2008 Excellence in the Academy Award for New Scholars.

Publications

• “No Body There: Notes on the Queer Migration to Cyberspace.” Journal of Popular Culture. (forthcoming, April 2010)
• “Scholarly Voice and Professional Identity in the Internet Age.” Thought and Action, 24 (Fall 2008), 23-33.
• “Why Southern Gospel Music Matters.” Religion and American Culture. 18.1 (Winter 2008), 27-58.
• “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), 37-64.
• “The Long Poem of Walking: Spatial Organization and Pedestrian Speech Acts in ‘Piers Plowman.’” AntiThesis 12, (Spring 2002), 192-217.