Robert Lamb

Ph.D., History of American Civilization, Harvard University, 1988

Research Areas:
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 

Biography

Bob Lamb grew up in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx and has also lived in Hartford, Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of James G. Birney and the Road to Abolitionism (full-issue monograph, Alabama Review 1994), Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010, xvii + 273 pp., paperback 2011), The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013, xvii + 233 pp., audiobook 2014, paperback 2015), and 25 articles and book chapters on Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Frank Norris, naturalism, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, literary theory, pedagogy, and film in such journals as College Literature, Journal of American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Hemingway Review, Twentieth Century Literature, South Atlantic Quarterly, Southern Review, ATQ, Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, American Literary Realism, Mississippi Quarterly, Midwest Quarterly, and Studies in Short Fiction. He is also co-editor, with the late G. R. Thompson, of A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, xvii + 622 pp., paperback Wiley-Blackwell 2009), a groundbreaking collection of twenty-nine new essays, to which he contributed the chapter on Mark Twain; and co-editor with Philip Haldeman of the 50^th Anniversary Edition of G. R. Thompson’s Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Seattle: English Hill Press, 2023, 338 pp. + ix). His two Hemingway books and the Companion were awarded Choice’s highest rating of “Essential to all readers”; and Art Matters was selected by Choice as an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2010,” praised as “literary criticism at its very finest” in a feature review in Twentieth Century Literature, and named one of the 75 best books ever published by LSU on the press’s sesquicentennial celebration. He is near completion of a new book entitled Huck and Jim’s America: Slavery, Race, and Realism in Mark Twain’s World.

Bob has served on 68 doctoral dissertation committees (20 as chair) and 18 master’s thesis and M.F.A. committees (6 as chair) since arriving at Purdue in 1991. Seventeen of these dissertations, seven of which he chaired, have been published as books. Sixty-six of his undergraduates have gone on to doctoral programs in English, American Studies, and African American Studies. The recipient of Harvard University’s Bowdoin Graduate Prize for Dissertations in the English Language, he has received 54 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, Bob 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, the only national award for undergraduate teaching, which is given to one Indiana professor, drawn from all disciplines and universities, in the state each year.  Bob lives with his wife Rita and two former stray kitties, Elizabeth Boyd Lamb, an intense, intellectually gifted dilute tortoise-shell hellion, and Simone Nicole Lamb, a classy, philosophically reserved but playful seal-point Siamese. They enjoy bird watching, ping pong ball soccer, hide-and-go seek, rooting for the Pittsburgh Steelers on tv, grooming each other, and listening to blues, jazz, and rock ’n’ roll (especially Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young).