About

James Mulholland is a Professor of English and an Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at NC State University. He oversees all aspects of academic and student affairs for a college that serves approximately 3,900 undergraduate and 800 graduate students. His role involves expanding students' access to high-impact experiences and promoting civil dialogue on complex social and cultural issues. As a faculty member, his research focuses on the global eighteenth century and world anglophone literature, especially literature produced within the British Empire. His notable work includes the book 'Before the Raj: Writing Early Anglophone India,' which offers a new literary history for English-language writing in British Asia before 1820, and 'Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820,' which explores the relationship between eighteenth-century poetry, British national identity, and colonial expansion. His research has been supported by various organizations, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Additionally, he writes about professional issues in higher education, including the value of the humanities, applying for fellowships and grants, revising dissertations, and academic publishing, with articles published in prominent outlets such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, and Public Books.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Media studies
• History
• Art
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Literature
• Geography
• Archaeology
• Law
• Ancient history
• Linguistics
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Unfinished Business: Reckoning with Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

  PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen access
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• Anglophone Epics and Ruin Poetry in Eighteenth-Century India

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-11-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Translocality and Translocalism

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-05-07 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Queer Historical Poetics and Queer Formalism

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-05-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter adopts techniques from historical poetics to understand the queerness of American poetry before 1850. It suggests a set of techniques and methods as descriptive of queer historical poetics. It places poetry in its historical context to determine how queerness has changed across early American history. By examining poetry from Puritan New England, eighteenth-century American satires, verse of the American Revolution, and poetic collaborations from the early Republic, this chapter shows how poetry was understood to be queer in colonial American and the early republic. It suggests a relationship between queerness and formalism that looks for the ways queer sociabilities and ordinary queerness appeared in traditions of American poetry, and how these forms might challenge our idea of queer poetry as always intent on being radical, deviant, or innovative. Queer historical poetics restores sexuality to discussions of the formalist and poetic traditions of American poetry before 1850 while borrowing from queer studies the demand for relevancy.

  PublisherDOI

• São Paulo and the Cultural Complexes of the City

  2023-10-16

  book-chapterSenior author

  Liliana Wahba examines the graffiti of São Paulo, Brazil, to understand the psyche of its people in the grips of postmodernity or hypermodernity in which fragmentation, dispersion, and uncertainty are the norm. Her analysis of a large variety of images reveals a collective psyche that seems overwhelmed, numbed, and tortured by the pace and dehumanization of the urban environment. In particular, the author identifies a sense of rootlessness and instability that results in a fragmentary and fluid self. However, she also detects the potential for creative renewal coming through art.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756–1815</i> by Ashley L. Cohen

  Eighteenth-Century Fiction · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Troy Bickham, and: British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 by James Watt

  Eighteenth-Century Studies · 2022-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Troy Bickham, and: British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 by James Watt James Mulholland Troy Bickham, Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Reaktion Books, 2020); distributed by Univ. of Chicago Press). Pp. 285, 85 halftones. $35 cloth. James Watt, British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 285. $99.99 cloth. One summer afternoon, while researching in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library, I came across a memorandum book of India's first Governor-General, Warren Hastings. He lived in India since the 1770s and was an enthusiastic sampler of South Asian culture (as well as an orientalist who combined colonial governance with cultural creation). Included among his drafts of poems, notes on weather, and accounts of meetings was a recipe for chicken kebabs—he called it "Kabaub Fowl"—which called for washing the chicken in salted water, rubbing it with "corriander seed, pepper and garlick" and "juice of ginger, chicory, and figs strained through a cloth" before stuffing it with "ghee and cloves" and roasting it over a gentle fire "until it is done, & looks red."1 Delicious, no doubt, and just as likely never prepared by Hastings himself. I thought of Hastings' recipe as I read Troy Bickham's capacious account of food and empire in the eighteenth century. Bickham's reads like a cross-over: a scholarly account that popularizes sharp expertise to knowledgeable non-academic readers. His book feels at times like the synthesis of accounts, among academic and popular writers alike, which tracked commodities and their effect on the globe, including salt (Salt: A World History [2003]), tea (A Thirst for Empire [2017]), sugar (Sweetness and Power [1986]; Sugar and Civilization [2015]), coffee (Uncommon Grounds [1999]), and curry (Curry: Cooks and Conquerors [2006]).2 As with many of these other accounts, Bickham sees in the preparation, consumption, and popular representation of food an image of how empire affected Britons and an indication of empire's extraordinary reach yet often ordinary effects. He describes empire as an "ever-moving umbrella" (10) of nearly incongruous activities, some of which were under British sovereignty but others that were negotiated with others. The middle grounds, translators, and imperial brokers that have become standard metaphors of twenty-first-century studies of empire are evident in how food connected domestic Britons to imperial dominion. Bickham describes the "abundance of choice" and the rituals it created as "a language" (17) that solidified "national and regional identities" (18) in Britain but also acted as a "tool for cultural critiques" (19). Doubleness of experience pervades Eating the Empire, which is also an explanation of how the foreign and exotic was made familiar and domestic. Bickham approaches foodways in the manner of an anthropologist or sociologist—as fundamentally about the interpersonal relationships forged by empire (9). In this way, his book is an elegantly interlocking story, and is extensively illustrated, typically with satirical prints that show commodities' imperial associations, making it an engaging overarching history of food and empire. At its most important, Eating the Empire describes the transformation of empire's goods from "rare luxuries to commonplace staples" across the eighteenth century (28), which necessarily altered diets, changed social practices, and arguably [End Page 556] made the current United Kingdom what it is, with teatime and biscuits but also curries and kebabs, of the type that Hastings encountered centuries ago. During the eighteenth century, consumer choice expanded rapidly, and what was a luxury in the seventeenth century was a staple one hundred years later (56). Then, as now, the rich censured the poor for the ingestion of what was seen as above their station (54), with anxieties about tea or coffee being replaced later with worries over carbonated drinks. Throughout Eating the Empire, Bickham touches on broad changes that are formative for the present: shopping (59–60), credit (61–65), fashion and fashionability (65), social visits and visiting (67), cook books (144), and in turn the evolution of politeness and manners, especially as related to the preparation and consumption of food. Some topics, such as coffee, are familiar to most eighteenth-century studies scholars, while...

  PublisherDOI

• What I’ve Learned about Writing a Second Book

  Journal of Scholarly Publishing · 2021-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Much has been written to inform academics about revising a dissertation and completing a book, but most of this advice focuses on first-time authors. By contrast, there is little advice directed toward more experienced academic authors that considers the conditions they confront when writing a second book, such as increased demands on them to provide institutional and professional service. Second-time authors may also enjoy the assurance that comes from having established a relationship with a publisher or having achieved tenure. This article offers three lessons about how writing a second book is different from writing the first. It considers how experienced authors’ relationships with publishers may change with a second book, and it examines ways to situate a second book in the course of a long academic career.

  PublisherDOI

• The Trial of Warren Hastings: Classical Oratory and Reception in Eighteenth-Century England/The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company/Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century/Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations

  European Romantic Review · 2021-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While sailing back from Asia in 1785, Warren Hastings self-pityingly complained in a diary about his imminent impeachment in the British Parliament, but even he could not foresee the length—seven y...

  PublisherDOI

• Before the Raj

  Johns Hopkins University Press eBooks · 2021 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
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Frequent coauthors

• Lisa Christy

  3 shared

• Stephanie Leslie

  3 shared

• Kari L. Besing

  3 shared

• Maria Brann

  Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis

  3 shared

• Mary F. Price

  3 shared

• Jennifer Custer

  3 shared

• Leslie J. Blackwell

  1 shared

• Sallyport

  1 shared

Labs

• Research and EngagementPI

Awards & honors

• Louis Gottschalk Prize (honorably mentioned)
• John Ben Snow Prize (shortlisted)
• Kenshur Prize (shortlisted)
• Marilyn Gaull Book Award (shortlisted)
• William Riley Parker Prize (honorable mention)