Max L. Chapnick

Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary's College

Ph.D. (2023), M.A. English and American Literature, Boston University

M.A. Creative Writing, Victoria University of Wellington

B.S. Physics; B.A. English, Washington and Lee University

chapnick @ bu.edu ; mchapnick @ saintmarys.edu

I am currently an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary's College. Previously, I worked as a Research Fellow at the New York Historical and as a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate at Northeastern University.

I teach and have taught first-year writing, advanced writing in the disciplines, and courses that cover nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century literature, global Anglophone literature, environmental literature, science fiction, and political history. My scholarly work concerns the intersection of rejected knowledge (pseudo-sciences like mesmerism, spiritualism, and conjure), radical social movements, and transatlantic nineteenth-century literature.

Full CV available here. Scroll down for links to my academic research, interviews, and public-facing work.

Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

Academic Research

Peer-reviewed articles

“Duty and Ambition in Louisa May Alcott Poems, Old and New,” American Periodicals 34.2, 2024; winner of the 2025 Beverly Lyon Clark article prize from the Louisa May Alcott Society
“Characters as Fields: Michael Faraday, Electromagnetism, and Charles Dickens's Bleak House,” Journal of Literature and Science 17.1, 2024; winner of the 2024 BSLS/JLS Early Career Prize
“New Louisa May Alcott Pieces: Radical Sensation in a Culture of Ambiguous Attribution,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 11.1, 2023
“George Eliot, Edward Said, and Romantic Zionism,” special issue on “Palestine: Romanticism’s Contemporary,” edited by Lenora Hanson, Studies in Romanticism 62.2, 2023
“Girls’ High and the ‘Wild Facts’ of Race in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood,” special issue on "Revisiting Black Boston," edited by Kerri Greenidge and Holly Jackson, The New England Quarterly 95:2, 2022

Academic editing

Forum co-editor with Eagan Dean, “Louisa May Alcott’s Work at 150,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 2024
Co-editor of “The Phantom” by E. H. Gould and “The Painter’s Dream” by Louisa M. Alcott, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 11.1, 2023

Selected short forms in refereed publications

Review of Rachel E. Walker's The Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 2025
"The Making of the American Culture of Work," a review of Todd Carmody's Work Requirements, Commonplace, April 2025
With Eagan Dean, Introduction to “Louisa May Alcott’s Work at 150,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 2024
“To Save Our Profession: Unionize!” (Forum Letter) PMLA 136:5, 2021
Review of Mary Bowden’s “H. G. Wells’s Plant Plot: Horticulture and Ecological Narration in The Time Machine,” Journal of Literature and Science, 14:1-2, 2021
Review of Rachel Crossland’s Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, Configurations 28:1, 2020

Interviews & Presentations

Videos and recorded presentations

"Wild Science: Mesmerists, Spiritualists, and Radicals in 19th Century New York," June 2025
Short videos for the New York Historical's social media: on mesmerism, spiritualism, and Louisa May Alcott
"Mark Twain vs. Christian Science and Empire," Tenth Annual Quarry Farm Symposium, September 2023
"Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in Pseudo-Scientific Socialist Utopias," Park Church Lecture, July 2022

Selected interviews on Alcott pseudonym and attributions

"The Many psuedonyms of Louisa May Alcott," Northeastern University, June 2024
"Northeastern researcher believes he found 20 new works by Louisa May Alcott," CBS Boston, November 2023
"New research uncovers a pseudonym potentially used by author Louisa May Alcott," WBUR Radio Boston, November 2023

"Discovery of Louisa May Alcott work found under new pseudonym, researcher says," Northeastern Global News, November 2023
"Researcher uncovers a new body of work believed to be by Louisa May Alcott," The Guardian, November 2023
"Louisa May Alcott used pen names. A researcher thinks he found another," WBUR Arts & Culture News, October 2023

Public-Facing Work

Public and creative writing

Essays for The Conversation, "The Gilded Age novel that helps explain our fascination with Luigi Mangione," January 2025; "How I identified a probable pen name of Louisa May Alcott," December 2023
Podcast co-host and co-editor for the C19 Podcast episodes, "the G19 New Book Forum," June 2024, and the C19 Podcast, “PhDs Who Union,” August 2023
- "PhDs Who Union" was excerpted in The American Vandal Podcast, "EdTech, AI, & The Unbundling of Research & Teaching"

Interviews for the G19 New Book Forum, 2021-2024
Co-authored essay in NPQ (Non-Profit Quarterly), “Sustainable Justice: Unionization and the Fight for the Common Good in Boston,” October 2022
Essays for Current Affairs: “Sidewalk Socialists and the Path to Power,” July 2021; “The Banality of Merit: Unlearning Obama,” March 2021
Reviews and journalism for Dig Boston, such as "Pride, Prejudice, and the Patriarchy," 2018-2021

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