Cody Marrs (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, with particular interests in Herman Melville, the Civil War, and the history and theory of literary criticism. His work combines close attention to literary form and aesthetics with large-scale historical inquiry, offering new ways of understanding how American literature develops across time.

His scholarship is animated by a central question: how might we read nineteenth-century American literature on its own terms, rather than through the assumptions of the present? His research emphasizes the intellectual ambition and aesthetic richness of the period, recovering a literary culture shaped by philosophical inquiry, spiritual exploration, and stylistic innovation.

He is the author of several influential books, including Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies (Oxford University Press, 2023), which advances a new account of aesthetics in Melville’s writing and in the discipline more broadly, and Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), a widely acclaimed study of how Americans have remembered and rewritten the Civil War across generations. The latter was awarded the Montaigne Medal for "the most thought-provoking book" and has been recognized for its ability to bridge academic and public audiences. 

His earlier monograph, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015), helped reshape scholarly understandings of literary periodization by arguing for a “transbellum” perspective that traces continuities across the conventional divide of 1865. This work, along with his co-edited volume Timelines of American Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), challenges linear models of literary history and proposes more flexible, overlapping frameworks for organizing the field. 

Professor Marrs plays a leading editorial role in the discipline. He is currently editing Volume B (1820–1865) of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, one of the most widely used and influential texts in the field, for its forthcoming 11th edition. He is the editor of American Literature in Transition: 1851-1877 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), as well as the General Editor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a major collaborative project involving nearly one hundred scholars. 

A distinguished Melville scholar, Marrs is a winner of the Hennig Cohen Prize in Melville Studies and the editor of The New Melville Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is currently completing two more books about Melville: The Routledge Companion to Herman Melville (co-edited with Brian Yothers) and The Guide to Herman Melville’s "Moby-Dick" (under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press), which offers a new account of the novel’s structure and intellectual design. His work on Melville seeks to reconstruct the author’s aesthetic and metaphysical commitments, situating them within broader traditions of art, religion, and philosophy.

Professor Marrs has also published widely in prominent journals and edited collections, with essays on writers such as Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, and on topics such as realism, war literature, and the relationship between poetry and the environment. He has received multiple awards for his research and teaching, as well as fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Newberry Library, the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, and the Willson Center for the Humanities. He currently serves on the editorial boards for J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.

Books:

(Author) The Guide to Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press)

(Co-Editor) The Routledge Companion to Herman Melville (under contract with Routledge)

(Editor) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 11th Edition, Volume B: 1820-1865 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2027).

(Author) Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

(Editor) Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, Vol. 3: 1851-1877 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

(Author) Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

(Co-Editor) Timelines of American Literature, co-edited with Christopher Hager (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

(Editor) The New Melville Studies (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

(Author) Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Edited Series:

General Editor for Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, 4 Vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Guest Editor:

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. Special Issue on "Late Melvilles," 18.3 (October 2016).

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

"American Literature, 1820-1865," in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 11th Edition, Volume B: 1820-1865 (forthcoming)

“Battle-Pieces and the Problem of Beauty,” in The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville, eds. Jennifer Greiman and Michael Jonik (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 477-488.

“Religion at Sea,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 26.2 (June 2024): 25-39. 

"The Front Line in American War Literature," French Review of American Studies 178.1 (2024): 120-133.

"Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective," American Literary Realism 55.3 (Spring 2023): 189-197.

"The War Story," in The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, eds. Gavin Jones and Michael Collins (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 117-130.

"Introduction: The System of American Literature, 1851-1877," in Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, Vol. 3 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 1-9.

“Frederick Douglass and the ‘Moral Chemistry of the Universe,’” in Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, ed. Edward Sugden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 19-28.

"The Civil War in African American Memory," in African American Literature in Transition, 1865-1880, eds. Eric Gardner and Joycelyn Moody (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 213-232.

“Frederick Douglass in 1848,” in the Norton Critical Edition of My Bondage and My Freedom, eds. Nicholas Bromell and Blake Gilpin (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020).

"1866 and After: Jane Jackson, Herman Melville, and the Literature of Emancipation," in Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image, eds. Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 219-228.

“Introduction,” co-authored with Christopher Hager, in Timelines of American Literature, eds. Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 1-9.

"Dickinson's Physics," in The New Emily Dickinson Studies, ed. Michelle Kohler (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 155-167.

“Introduction: Melville Studies, Old and New," In The New Melville Studies, ed. Cody Marrs (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1-10.

“Drum-Taps and the Chaos of War,” in This Mighty Convulsion: Whitman and Melville Write the Civil War, eds. Christopher Sten and Tyler Hoffman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 119-134.

"Introduction: Late Melvilles," Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 18.3 (October 2016): 1-10.

"Afterword: Archiving the War," co-authored with Christopher Hager, in A History of American Civil War Literature, ed. Coleman Hutchison (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 331-342.

"Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth Century," co-authored with Christopher Hager, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1.2 (Fall 2013): 259-284. 

"A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville's Poetic Turn," American Literature 82.1 (March 2010): 91–119. (Awarded the Hennig Cohen Prize for the best essay or chapter in Melville studies.)