Bob Lamb
Professor, Department of English
| Education: | Ph.D., History of American Civilization, Harvard University, 1988 |
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| Office: | HEAV 435 |
| Office Phone: | (765) 49-43776 |
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| Specializations: | American fiction 1791-1955; Euro-American realism, naturalism, and modernism; the short story; race and ethnicity; Jewish American Literature; American Studies; American social, cultural, and intellectual history, 1765-1974; American political thought; popular culture; film studies; sports culture |
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Bob Lamb grew up in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx and has also lived in Hartford, Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He teaches undergraduate courses in American literature and in the short story, and graduate courses in nineteenth-century American literature and modern American fiction. He has served on 64 doctoral dissertation committees (20 as chair) and 21 master’s thesis committees (9 as chair) since arriving at Purdue in 1991. Fifteen of these dissertations, seven of which he chaired, have since been published as books. Bob has authored
Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming fall 2009), a full-issue monograph entitled
James G. Birney and the Road to Abolitionism (
Alabama Review 1994), and twenty articles on Melville, Whitman, Mark Twain, Frank Norris, naturalism, Hemingway, Langston Hughes, literary theory, pedagogy, and film in such journals as
Twentieth Century Literature,
Centennial Review,
Journal of American Studies,
Hemingway Review,
Modern Fiction Studies,
South Atlantic Quarterly,
Southern Review,
ATQ,
College Literature,
Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism,
Midwest Quarterly, and
Studies in Short Fiction. He is also co-editor, with G. R. Thompson, of
A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 (Oxford, Malden, MA, and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell, 2005, xvii + 622 pp.), a groundbreaking collection of twenty-nine new essays divided into three sections - historical traditions and genres, cultural contexts and themes, and major authors - to which he contributed the essay on Mark Twain. The
Companion will be reissued in a paperback edition in July 2009. His current projects include two books, tentatively entitled "The Four Worlds of Huckleberry Finn: Reading, Race, and Realism," and "Citizen Twain: A Political Biography of Samuel Langhorne Clemens." A recipient of Harvard University's Bowdoin Graduate Prize for Dissertations in the English Language, he has received three dozen teaching awards, including The Stephen Botein Prize for Teaching Excellence (Harvard 1988), The School of Liberal Arts Departmental Award for Educational Excellence (Purdue 1997), and the University Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching in Honor of Charles B. Murphy (Purdue 1998), and he was inducted into Purdue’s
The Book of Great Teachers in 2003. In 2008, he was named the Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Bob lives with two former stray kitties, Elizabeth Boyd Lamb, an intense, very gifted tortoise-shell hellion, and Simone Nicole Lamb, a classy, philosophically reserved but playful seal-point Siamese. The three of them enjoy bird watching, ping pong ball soccer, hide-and-go seek, watching Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants games on tv, and listening to blues, jazz, and rock ‘n roll.
