Join us virtually as Ben Bascom speaks on his new book Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (2024), which looks at the paradoxical nature of masculine self-promotion and individuality in the early United States. Much of U.S. cultural production since the twentieth century has celebrated the figure of the singular individual, from the lonesome Huckleberry Finn to the cinematic loners John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, but that tradition casts a backward shadow obscuring how the “singular” in America was previously marked as unwanted, outcast, excessive, or weird. Through a collection of singular life narratives, Bascom draws on a queer studies approach that uncovers how fraught private desires shaped a public masculinity increasingly at odds with the indifferent norms of republican public culture.
Ben Bascom is assistant professor of English at Ball State University, Indiana, where he teaches early and nineteenth-century American literatures and contemporary LGBTQ literatures. He has published scholarship in American Literary History, Early American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, among others. His monograph, Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Bascom was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at AAS in 2019 and was elected to AAS membership in April 2024.