Attention and Surveillance

Caleb Smith is the Karl Young Professor of English and of American Studies at Yale University. In addition to a faculty appointment in the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College in 2008 and 2013-2016, Smith was the George P. Lacay endowed lecturer at Georgetown University in spring 2019 and the Lora Hutchins Heberle endowed lecturer at the University of Michigan in fall of 2023. His books include The Prison and the American Imagination, which won Yale’s Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication; The Oracle and the Curse; and the first published edition Austin Reed’s 1858 prison memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict. His latest, Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, was published in 2023. Smith’s research has been featured and reviewed by the New York Times, National Public Radio, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the Guardian (UK), the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and many other outlets. He has published articles in Critical Inquiry, American Literature, and J19; and he has written about culture and politics for n+1, BOMB, Paper Monument, Avidly, Public Books, The Chronicle Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor.