CAMPUS DIRECTORY

Research: 

Dr. Zelnik received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2016. A cultural historian, his research examines the interweaving categories of race, nation, and gender in the early United States. His forthcoming book, under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press and tentatively titled “American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850,” looks at humor and play as it traces the rise to dominance of common white men to positions of cultural prominence by the antebellum period.   

Publications: 

“Masculinities in Early America,” The Routledge Companion to Masculinity, in American Literature and Culture, ed. Lydia R. Cooper (Routledge, 2021). 

“Self-Evident Walls: Reckoning with Recent Histories of Race and Nation,” Journal of the Early Republic, 41:1 (March 2021), 1-38. 

"Yankees, Doodles, Fops, and Cuckolds: Compromised Manhood and Provincialism in the Revolutionary Period, 1740-1781" Early American Studies, 16:3 (Summer, 2018), 514-544. Winner of the Dorothy Ross Prize from the Society of United States Intellectual Historians (S-USIH) for the best article by an emerging scholar.