Philipp Löffler is assistant professor of American literature. His work concentrates on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction and poetry, with a particular interest in the uses of history in literature, the history of reading, and the connection between literature and education. He has published on Henry David Thoreau, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and Richard Powers, amongst others, and has edited two books on the connections between institutionalized reading habits and the production of literary value: Reading Practices (Narr) and Reading the Canon (Winter). His first monograph is Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War (Camden House). His next book will be a cultural history of US literary professionalism in the nineteenth century, tentatively titled Publishing Scoundrels: American Literature and the Professionalization of Authorship, 1790-1915.