Expertise

American Literature. Visual Studies, Photography, Modernism, Material Culture, Spatial Studies, Interdisciplinary Methodology

Biography

Miles Orvell is Professor of English & American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. His publications have ranged from literary criticism to broader studies of American culture. His early book on Flannery O'Connor was followed by The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (1989),  a study of technology and culture that was co-winner of the ASA's John Hope Franklin Prize (reissued in a Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition). The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (2012) was a Finalist for the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for Best Book Published on Community and Social Cohesion,  2013. Orvell's Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction was published by Oxford University Press in early 2021. 

In addition, he is the author of After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (1995) and of American Photography (2003) in the Oxford History of Art Series. (Expanded and revised in 2016 as Photography in America.) Orvell has edited the volume, John Vachon's America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II (2003) and he has co-edited Public Place and the Ideology of Space in America (2009) and Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue (2013). He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of American Studies (American Studies Association--print and online),  from 1998 to 2011. He is the recipient of several NEH awards and of the Bode-Pearson Prize in American Studies for lifetime achievement. In 2010, he received one of the University’s “Great Teacher” awards.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications

• Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction (Oxford University Press, 2021)
• Photography in America (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. 25th Anniversary edition, 2014. (University of North Carolina Press)
• Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue, co-edited with Klaus Benesch (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
• The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (Univ. North Carolina, 2012) 286 pages. Finalist, Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for Best Book Published on Community and Social Cohesion, 2013
• John Vachon’s America, Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II (University of  California Press, 2003)
• American Photography  (Oxford History of Art Series, Oxford UP, 2003)
• After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (University Press of Mississippi, 1995)
• Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor (Temple University Press, 1972). Reprinted, with a new preface, as Flannery O'Connor: An Introduction (University Press of Mississippi, Fall 1991)

Courses Taught

• American Literature, Romanticism
• American Literature,  Realism & Naturalism
• American Literature, Modernism
• American Literature, Contemporary
• Photography and Literature
• Hybrid Genres: Image/Text
• Technology and Culture
• History of Photography
• Cities and Suburbs
• Documentary Film
• Introduction to Graduate Study
• History of Criticism