I am an Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University in Miami, FL. I received my PhD in Literature at the University of California-San Diego under the co-direction of Nicole Tonkovich and Sara E. Johnson. I attended Marquette University for my MA in English and BA in English and History. At heart, my research focuses on intersections of transoceanic materiality and sentimental culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. My teaching centers on hemispheric early America as well as theories of disability, masculinity, and affect.

My ongoing monograph projects, detailed elsewhere, are:

Sentimental Seamen: Feeling Bodies in an American Age of Sail 

Pirates of Sympathy: Oceanic Inheritances in Antebellum Literature & Culture 

In support of these projects, I have been a fellow at Mystic Seaport Museum, the John Carter Brown Library, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the University of Virginia. A more complete CV may be found here.

Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to collaborate:

Email: makelley@fiu.edu

Twitter: @markbkelley

“For sailors, though they have their jokes/Still feel & think like other folks.” Benjamin Morrell Jr.