About

Timothy Marr is a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1998, an A.M. in Education from Stanford University in 1985, and a B.A. in American Studies from Williams College in 1984. His research interests focus on the history of American perceptions of Islam, American engagements with Muslims, and the life and writings of Herman Melville. His book, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, explores how Islamic orientalism became a transnational resource for early American global imaginings. Marr is currently writing a relational history examining the century-long enterprise of military conflict, imperial governance, industrial development, and intercultural education between U.S. Americans and the Muslim Moros of the southern Philippines. He has co-edited the book Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick and has published extensively on Melville in various scholarly outlets. Marr served as President of the Melville Society in 2021 and is involved as an executive member of the Melville Society Cultural Project and co-editor of the History Research Group for the Melville Electronic Library. With a diverse teaching background that includes high school and university teaching in California, Connecticut, Pakistan, and Australia, he joined UNC in 2000. He has held visiting professorships at Radboud University and the University of the Philippines, and has received fellowships and awards such as the NEH Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, the Chapman Fellowship at IAH, and the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Research topics

• History
• Computer Science
• Art
• Physics
• Optics
• Astronomy
• Library science

Selected publications

• I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said's America

  Journal of American History · 2025-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Melville's<i>Mardi</i>

  2022-08-12

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Chapter 7. Exorbitant Optics and Lunatic Pleasures

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Optics
  • Art
  • Physics
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• The New Melville Studies ed. by Cody Marrs

  Leviathan · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The New Melville Studies ed. by Cody Marrs Timothy Marr CODY MARRS, ED. The New Melville Studies Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii + 280 pp. “Some substances, without undergoing any mutations themselves, utterly change their color, according to the light thrown upon them.” – White-Jacket The New Melville Studies is the first book published in the Cambridge University Press series Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions, which released seven other editions in 2019, including books on Dickinson and Whitman. The mission of the series is twofold: to explore both “changing critical interpretations” and “substantial scholarly shifts” (ii). This volume shares the series’ focus by “analyzing Melville as a writer who was keenly interested in the pleasures, limits, and possibilities of various reading practices” and by approaching him “as a theorist as well as a writer” (i). The collection’s fifteen essays provide a vital examination of what editor Cody Marrs calls “Melville’s formal commitments, philosophical entanglements, and cultural exchanges” (3). Marrs explains the innovation that informs this book as a shift away from a deductive, distant, and ironic act of privileged diagnosis toward a postcritical practice of creative interpretation that integrates critical reading with imaginative experience. He calls this “reading adjacently” or “with the grain . . . alongside Melville as he writes” (3), a practice that Robert Levine cites in his summary essay as reading “horizontally, immanently” (227). Going beyond categorical binaries and opposing dualisms, this approach dramatizes the varied and mutually constitutive ways that apparently contradictory poles imaginatively and dialectically correspond. The emphasis on “multiple, juxtaposed perspectives” (8) reflects the diverse sociality of Melville’s symposium of Mardi, the gams of Moby-Dick, the colloquy of The Confidence-Man, and the pilgrimage of Clarel. The mode also exhibits how Melville’s literary formulations instigate their readers’ critical confabulations through a processual enterprise of co-creation. Some of the supposed oppositions made to combine [End Page 121] in this collection’s experiments are the old and the new, fiction and philosophy, prose and poetry, voice and silence, the organic and the intentional, sense and style, and, as marked by the two sections around which the essays are grouped, “Thinking with Melville” and “Feeling with Melville.” Melville’s imagination moved beyond dualities, akin to how he conceived of the sperm whale’s brain as coalescing a dynamic tension between two oppositional lines of sight. He poetically voiced this creative process in his poem “Art” as an active “wrestling” during which “unlike things must meet and mate” and then “fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart.” In this volume, this dialectic entanglement often generates paradoxical inversions, such as when fiction reveals truths, the distant and ancient informs present theory, and imaginative invention becomes the vehicle for philosophy. Melville called this method “the great Art of Telling the Truth,” through which serious meditation can take the form of humorous wordplay. It is in the fluid conjunctions of these fertile formulations—and their privileging of unresolved interpenetration—that these essays refract bracing and complex insights into the liveliness and profundity of Melville’s creative art. This review assesses the essays in this collection in order of Melville’s composition to relate a chronological sense of the volume’s scope, though the fact that the book’s own organization tacks back and forth through Melville’s career shows its inventiveness. Edward Sugden inaugurates Melville’s experience in Polynesia as a transgression into a “marginal state” (67), a terra incognita in the transcultural chasm between world systems that is more incommensurable than permeable. Engaging Nan Z. Da’s notion of intransigence, Sugden suggests that Typee’s protagonists, Tommo and Toby, experience the rupture of dissolution, leaving them adrift and vulnerable in ways that generate a “radical freedom” (78). This liberty opens an affiliation with the underclass that generates an amorphous potential to reverse allegiances, such as when Tommo becomes Typee in the nomadic adventures of the sequel, Omoo. Levine points out how Tommo’s use of humor is another manifestation of the statelessness of such perspectivism. Samuel Otter’s essay on “Melville’s Style” expands Sugden’s argument about Tommo’s “curtailed crossing” (68) by averring that “Something happened to Melville on Nuku...

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• Review: <i>American Datu: John J. Pershing and Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Muslim Philippines, 1899–1913</i>, by Ronald K. Edgerton

  Pacific Historical Review · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • History
  • Library science

  Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: American Datu: John J. Pershing and Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Muslim Philippines, 1899–1913, by Ronald K. Edgerton American Datu: John J. Pershing and Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Muslim Philippines, 1899–1913. By Ronald K. Edgerton. (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2020. xv + 357 pp.) Timothy Marr Timothy Marr University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2021) 90 (3): 401–403. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2021.90.3.401 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Timothy Marr; Review: American Datu: John J. Pershing and Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Muslim Philippines, 1899–1913, by Ronald K. Edgerton. Pacific Historical Review 1 August 2021; 90 (3): 401–403. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2021.90.3.401 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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• 13. “Out of This World”

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
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• Subjugating the Sultan of Sulu: American Imperial Negotiations in the Muslim Philippines

  2020-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• “NEARER TO US IN NATURE”:

  University of Iowa Press eBooks · 2019-11-15 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Jeffery Einboden

  Religion & literature · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  BOOK REVIEWS 149 never viewed thought and knowledge as settled or static, and instead leapt at the opportunity presented by apparent logical contradictions to produce new knowledge, as James Engell notes in his chapter, which shares the book’s title (238). The authors’ frequent dialoguing with one another helps clarify the narrow scope of some of the essays in the book and encourages a comprehensive rather than a selective reading. As interest in the growing interdisciplinary fields of attention studies and boredom studies continues to grow, Coleridge and Contemplation positions itself as a rousing and timely resource, enhancing ongoing debates among Romanticists and Coleridgeans regarding Coleridge’s vitally vermicular, but often bewildering theory of mind and its diverse applications. Sean Nolan The Graduate Center of the City University of New York The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction Jeffery Einboden Oxford University Press, 2016. xv + 216 pp. $78 cloth. Through a series of excellent monographs, Jeffrey Einboden has emerged as an expert philologist of global literary studies who reveals new comparative apertures for interpreting early American writing. Based on his remarkable multilingual acumen, Einboden has honed an original methodology which locates specific acts of textual transmission as productive matrices for exposing the dynamics of intercultural exchange. His 2013 book, NineteenthCentury U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages ingeniously wrestled with the lexical complexities involved in translating canonical American literature into Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. The scholarship in this book reverses the optics by witnessing expressions in Arabic and engagement with Muslim sources buried in the private writings of five important early American intellectuals: Ezra Stiles, William Bentley, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture uncovers “a domestic American tradition of Islamic engagement” (126) extending from the Revolutionary period through the American Renaissance as Protestantism is transformed across a sequence of New England generations from Calvinism to Unitarianism to Transcendentalism. Religion & Literature 150 The book’s strengths derive from the depths of Einboden’s archival discoveries from a dozen repositories and the precision of his close readings of his excavated evidence. Einboden’s sleuthing reveals dynamic ways that Islamic sources, Qur’anic translations, and Arabic inscriptions were domesticated and incorporated into these writers’ intimate modes of self-fashioning. Digging beneath published writings, Einboden examines material markings in manuscripts that are more concealed, including diaries, notebooks, primers, epistolary exchanges, marginalia, and scribblings on envelopes. He argues convincingly that the discoveries he has made have been neglected because later editors, lacking linguistic competency, omitted many Arabic inscriptions in their collections. Einboden’s love of language is palpable in his revelatory analysis of how words and works transmit between languages and move through time and space, and become manifest in intimate instances of semantic production never disclosed until these critical interventions bring them to light. Einboden’s first two chapters address two important but underexamined early American religious thinkers: the Calvinist Ezra Stiles and the Unitarian William Bentley. Einboden examines the personal writings of these ministers to reveal how their study of Arabic and their reading of Islamic sources served as exegetical resources from which they constituted more cosmopolitan religious selves. The book begins when Ezra Stiles pens an illustrative inscription to his son that includes verses from the Qur’an in Arabic, performing a “hybrid paternity” (32) between varied Semitic languages. Another remarkable moment of Stiles’ “ecumenical exchanges” (24) is when, at the end of a letter to Rabbi Isaac Cardigal, he signs his own name in Arabic script. Stiles also prophesies that the emergent American nation will preserve the “great purity and elegance” of the English language exemplified by how the sacredness of Arabic has been preserved despite the proliferation of provincial dialects. The second chapter features William Bentley, known in his time as “America’s ‘most learned’ man” (51), whose situation as a prominent minister in Salem placed him within a circuit of transoceanic exchange that enabled him to acquire twenty-eight Islamic texts, which have “never received critical notice, despite representing the richest collection of Muslim manuscripts assembled in Jeffersonian America” (57). Like Stiles, Bentley believed the capacity to read Arabic was “exceedingly useful...

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• Exorbitant Optics and Lunatic Pleasures

  J19 · 2017-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Exorbitant Optics and Lunatic Pleasures Timothy Marr (bio) Thus, in the beginning all the World was America —John Locke, 1690 The whole world’s a ball —the Manxman in Moby-Dick Washington Irving claims he stayed up late at night wondering if scientists on the moon would discover and civilize our globe. He sympathizes in Knickerbocker’s History of New York with the humanity of American Indians by satirically equating the arrival of European ships with the aerial invasion of earth from the moon. These visitants find our “obscure little dirty planet” to be a “howling wilderness” whose denizens imbibe their gift of nitrous oxide and “are utterly destitute of tails, and of a variety of unseemly complexions, particularly of horrible whiteness, instead of pea-green.” The imperial Man in the Moon commands his settlers “to use every means to convert these infidel savages from the darkness of Christianity, and make them thorough and absolute Lunatics.” When we humans resist they “hunt us with hippogriffs, transfix us with concentrated sun-beams, demolish our cities with moon-stones,” until the converted remnant is offered a refuge in either the desert of Arabia or the ice of Lapland.1 Irving’s imagination exemplifies exorbitance because it delivers an extraplanetary ambit that distances cultural habits in ways that reveal outlandish angles of fresh perspective. The widely circulated image of the earth taken from Apollo 17 in 1972 materialized a parallax view of the planet from outer space as a “blue marble” that opened up new dispositions for planetary allegiance and environmental activism. My notions of [End Page 11] both National and Geographic were exploded after I unfolded that magazine’s 1983 map of a “Journey into the Universe Through Space and Time,” which graphically dramatized several mind-blowing leaps of scale: the Earth nested within the solar system, but then the Sun becoming a speck circling the Milky Way, which itself was then made minuscule within the ironically named “Local Group” of other clustered galaxies whose mighty magnitudes themselves paled before receding quasars. Even before this map, David Bowie’s “Major Tom” who is “floating in a most peculiar way / … Far above the moon” and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” who is “burning out his fuse up here alone” sang the existential fantasy of loners speaking back to “Ground Control” from the special sweep of space.2 The Irish-Mexican philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman mused that the emergence of the peripheral American hemisphere in European world-views first invented the capacity to view “the whole surface of the terraqueous globe … as a continuous whole.”3 Such powerful perspectivism helped to enable the designs of global imperialism, yet these horizons also unmoored the latitudes of imagination from the physical contours of the planet itself. Paul Giles’s The Global Remapping of American Literature posits the period before the Civil War as a transnational era when the boundless boundaries of the United States were unstable in ways that rendered its literary productions incapable of being contained by notions of the national.4 The unmapped aspects of antebellum America licensed literary writers to spawn inordinate vantages on the world. These exorbitant imaginations exposed readers to replenishing scopes and scales that refracted sublunary provincialisms within more cosmic, critical, and, in Irving’s case, comic relief. Thoreau, an exemplar of this earlier extravagance, writes how the strange irradiation of moonlight not only affects the tides of ocean and thought but also deracinates all humans “intellectually and morally” into an absurd collective of “Albinos.”5 A fascinating invocation of interorbital imagination can be seen in a lesser-known work often considered the first American work of science fiction. George Tucker was a Bermuda-born three-term congressman whom Thomas Jefferson appointed as the first professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia. (Jefferson described his interdisciplinary job offer as “mental sciences generally, including Ideology, general grammar, logic and Ethics”—belle lettres, rhetoric, and political economy were added later!) In 1827, when Tucker was living in Pavilion IX on the Charlottesville campus, he penned his Voyage to the Moon, his account of “the people of Morosofia, and other lunarians.” One of Tucker’s [End Page 12] students was Edgar...

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Frequent coauthors

• Robert S. Levine

  Florida Atlantic University

  4 shared

• John Bryant

  2 shared

• Hester Blum

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• Jeannine Marie DeLombard

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1 shared

• Christopher Castiglia

  1 shared

• Elizabeth Renker

  The Ohio State University

  1 shared

• Samuel Otter

  1 shared

• Susanna Rowson

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2006)
• NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2013-14)
• Chapman Fellow at the IAH (2009)
• Fulbright lecturer in Cyprus (2007)
• President of the Melville Society (2021)