Ashley Rattner

Assistant Professor
 113 Stone Center
arattner@jsu.edu          

Specializing in early and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Dr. Rattner’s research interests include utopia, reform, print culture, antislavery activism, communal studies, and public humanities. She is currently working on a monograph titled "The Crass Materiality of Utopia: Publishing Communitarian Reform in Nineteenth Century America.” 

Dr. Rattner’s scholarship appears in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and J19 and is forthcoming in Early American Literature and Gender and Sexuality in the Midwest (Ohio University Press). She has published reviews in Journal of American Studies, African American Literature, and Communal Societies. Her public writing appears in Teaching C19, Avidly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Dr. Rattner has held research fellowships at Winterthur, the Center for Communal Studies, and the William L. Clements Library. In summer 2025, she participated in the “Sex, Gender, and Print” seminar at the American Antiquarian Society. She has delivered lectures at the Maine Historical Society, Heritage Alliance, Tusculum University, and Ohio University. Dr. Rattner has co-chaired the C19 Podcast since 2022.

Marija Reiff

Courses Taught:

  • EH 525: Good Trouble: Social Reform in Nineteenth Century America

  • EH 502 Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

  • EH 370: The American Novel

  • EH 219: Honors Literature I: American Utopias

  • EH 206: Literature for Life: Environmental Literature

  • EH 201 American Literature I: Beginnings to 1865

  • EH 101 Composition I

Education

  • PhD, Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Memphis, 2018
  • MA, English, University of Memphis, 2013
  • BA, English, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2010

Other Responsibilities

  • Co-Organizer, African American Read-In
  • Faculty Senate
  • CAHS Awards Committee
  • Graduate Faculty Committee
  • Reading and Lecture Series Committee
  • Literature Survey Committee
  • Social Committee
  • Faculty Advisor: Jax Angels Majorettes

Publications

  • “Learning to Read like an Abolitionist: Benjamin Lundy and the Early Antislavery Print Sphere.” Forthcoming in Early American Literature 61.1.
  • “Gender Rubble: Attempts at Equality in Robert Owen’s New Harmony.” Forthcoming in Gender and Sexuality in the Midwest edited by Katherine Jellison, Ohio University Press.
  • “Revisiting P.T. Barnum’s American Museum.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Volume 12, Issue 2, Winter 2024, pp. 749-756.
  •  “‘No such Faery Land, so like the real world’: Miles Coverdale’s Performance of the Utopian Spectacle.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review Volume 47, Issue 2, December 2021, pp. 231-249.