Caleb Smith

Professor of English and American Studies

LC 311

I teach American literature and other weird, beautiful things that people make out of the contradictions in American life—contradictions between liberty and slavery, secularism and fanaticism, tolerance and exclusion. My courses include a lecture, “Love and Hate in the South,” as well as seminars on such special topics as confession, distraction, and historicism. I also teach seminars at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution through the Yale Prison Education Initiative.

My main research topic is the culture of discipline in the United States: stories, images, and fantasies about how people exercise control over themselves and others. My first book, The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale UP, 2009), traced a genealogy of the penitentiary system from its origins in enlightenment reforms to the prison industrial complex. In a second book, The Oracle and the Curse (Harvard UP, 2013), I explored how judges and offenders make claims to justice by appearing to speak as the vessels of a higher law—a suppression of personal identity that, when it works, enlarges the speaker’s ethical and political authority. I authenticated and edited Austin Reed’s 1858 manuscript, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (Random House, 2016), the first known prison memoir by an African American writer. My most recent book is Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture (Princeton UP, 2024).

I am a regular contributor to Critical Inquiry, and I have written about contemporary topics for n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books, and many other venues.

Personal website: https://campuspress.yale.edu/calebsmith/