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Thomas Koenigs teaches and writes about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, with a particular focus on prose fiction and the novel. His first book, Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States (Princeton University Press 2021), reframes the history of the novel in the United States as a history of competing varieties of fictionality. Spanning the years 1789鈥�1861, Founded in Fiction challenges the 鈥渞ise of the novel鈥� narrative that has long dominated the study of American fiction by highlighting how many of the texts that have often been considered the earliest American novels actually defined themselves in contradistinction to the novel. Their writers developed self-consciously extranovelistic varieties of fiction, as they attempted to reform political discourse, shape women鈥檚 behavior, reconstruct a national past, and advance social criticism. The book is a history of the ways in which these diverse forms and theories of fiction shaped how Americans addressed issues ranging from national politics to gendered authority to the intimate violence of slavery.

He is currently at work on a second book that explores the varied modes for representing thought and interiority in US fiction from before the rise of the novel of consciousness in the late nineteenth century. The book explores early US writers鈥� deep ambivalence about fiction鈥檚 distinctive potential to represent the hidden thoughts and feelings of its characters and traces the formal alternatives they developed to the transparent psychonarration conventionally found in third-person fiction. An article drawn from this project entitled 鈥淎 Wild and Ambiguous Medium: Democracy, Interiority, and the Early American Novel鈥� was recently published in a special issue of American Literary History on 鈥淒emocracy and the Novel in the US.鈥�

His articles and essays on American literature have appeared in ELH, ALH, American Literature, Early American Literature, J19, ESQ, and The Journal of American Studies. He also co-edited a special issue of Early American Literature on 鈥淓arly American Fictionality鈥� with Matthew Pethers (University of Nottingham).

At Scripps, Professor Koenigs teaches courses on American literature, including 鈥淩eadings in American Literature,鈥� 鈥淎merican Women Writers,鈥� 鈥淭he Slave Narrative and the Novel of Slavery,鈥� 鈥淭he Early American Novel,鈥� 鈥淢elville and Douglass,鈥� and 鈥淎merican Modernism.鈥� He also teaches senior seminars on 鈥淎ntebellum Literature and Popular Culture鈥� and 鈥淭heory of the American Novel.鈥� He has taught in Core I and he often teaches a Core II course on 鈥淏ecoming Someone in American Culture.鈥� He received the Mary W. Johnson Faculty Achievement Awards for teaching (2014-15 and 2018-19) and for research (2015-16 and 2019-2020).