Bryan Waterman

Bryan Waterman has taught literature at New York University since 2001, including a 10-year residency at NYU Abu Dhabi from 2012-22. A cultural historian of reading, writing, arts scenes, and literary sociability, his research ranges from the history of friendship in late-eighteenth-century New York City (Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature) to the origins of punk rock on New York's Lower East Side in the 1970s (Television's Marquee Moon: 33 1/3 series). He is currently completing Elizabeth Whitman's Disappearance: A True Story of Literary Celebrity and Seduction from Revolutionary America, the history behind an early US bestselling novel, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797).

At NYU Abu Dhabi, Waterman served for seven years as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Development and Director of the Core Curriculum. In that position, he helped develop hundreds of unique Core courses, across all disciplines, designed around timeless and timely questions about human experience, global cultures, and natural environments. His own regular courses in Abu Dhabi and New York include Contagion, a survey of writing in and around epidemics, real and fictional, from ancient worlds to the present; Records, an exploration of why humans document experience and how the documentary media and technologies we develop can be used to make art; Empathy, a multidisciplinary inquiry into the whys and hows of imagining others' experiences and points of view; Writing New York (with Cyrus Patell), an idiosyncratic survey of the city's literary history; and The Age of Warhol, which examines how underground arts communities in the 1960s transformed mainstream American culture in the 1970s and 1980s. His favorite novel is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; his favorite recent novel is Percival Everett’s James.