Rate My Professor Amanda Claybaugh

Amanda Claybaugh serves as Dean of Undergraduate Education and holds the position of Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of English at Harvard University. She earned a BA in English from Yale University in 1993 and a PhD in English from Harvard University in 2001. Following nine years of teaching at Columbia University, she returned to Harvard in 2010. Claybaugh is a member of the English department faculty and previously chaired the program in History and Literature for four years. Her scholarship centers on nineteenth-century literature and history, emphasizing the contributions of teachers and writers during periods of social change. Her first book, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World, received the Rudikoff Prize in Victorian studies. She has authored additional scholarly articles and contributes to public outlets including the London Review of Books, Public Books, and n+1. Claybaugh is completing a narrative nonfiction project for Farrar, Straus & Giroux examining the Union occupation of the South Carolina sea islands during the Civil War. Her teaching encompasses courses on the nineteenth-century novel, the twenty-first-century novel, the historical novel, and the Bildungsroman, along with participation in Humanities 10 and a General Education course on the Civil War.

Claybaugh maintains an active role in undergraduate education leadership at Harvard while sustaining her commitments to research, writing, and instruction in English literature and related historical contexts.