Max L. Chapnick

Peer-reviewed articles

• “Arabella Buckley’s Cosmology for Children,” special issue on “Longing to Know: Gender and the Production of Scientific Knowledge” edited by Imogen Forbes-Macphail and Anna Henchman for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 22.1, 2026

• “Mighty Liars in the Utopia: Science, Violence, and Belief in Connecticut Yankee,” special issue on “The American Novel at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” edited by Rafael Walker and Nathan Wolff, Arizona Quarterly, 81.1, 2026

• “Mark Twain’s Close Reading Skills vs. Christian Science and Colonial Empire,” Mark Twain Annual, 23, 2025

• “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; winner of Beverly Lyon Clark Prize from the Louisa May Alcott Society

• “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 41.2, 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

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

• “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

Selected 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

• Interviews for the G19 New Book Forum, 2021-2024

•  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