Doug Guerra

Douglas A. Guerra teaches courses in U.S. literature, media theory, popular culture, and the relationships between technological innovation, aesthetic form, and social arrangement. He is the Director of the English Program at Oswego and has been a guide and mentor for the International English Honor Society’s “One City. One Campus. One Community.” project—a collaboration with the Campus Community Relations Committee and the City of Oswego Mayor’s Office, which profiles the people and institutions at the heart of vital relationships between the University and the City of Oswego.  

Guerra is a founding member and previous Chair of the C19 Podcast, a podcast spotlighting the work of American nineteenth-century scholars from around the world. His first book, Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America (UPenn Press 2018), won the Popular Culture Association’s Ray and Pat Browne Award, and his experiments in pedagogy using memes to teach Walt Whitman were featured as part of the C19 Society’s #TeachingC19 series. His current work considers the way that games materialize modes of care and tending that small groups use to build enduring but often materially ephemeral social worlds. Alongside this, he has been researching the coincident construction of “carelessness” in the print sporting cultures of masculinity that attached themselves to young and vulnerable men in the massive urban migrations that characterized the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Guerra has published articles in American Literature and ESQ, and his scholarship has been supported by The Strong Museum of Play, the American Antiquarian Society, Pennsylvania State University's First Book Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Education

• Ph.D., Loyola University Chicago, 2011
• BA, University of Chicago, 2001