Joseph C. Murphy received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a dissertation on the synergy between world’s fairs and American literary culture in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His teaching and research delineate a crossroads between American literature, visual culture, and allegorical traditions, and his publications focus on a number of writers, including Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and especially Willa Cather. He is currently writing a book exploring Cather’s modernism as a distillation of turn-of-the-century cultures of spectacle, e.g., Wagnerism, Indian pageants, art museums, urban development, minstrelsy, and religious ritual. Beginning in 2015, he will contribute the annual review of Cather criticism to American Literary Scholarship (Duke UP). His most recent project is a study of Venice in the American literary imagination.