John Cyril Barton is Department Chair and Professor of English. He joined the UMKC English Department in 2005, after receiving his Ph.D. in English, with an emphasis in Critical Theory, from the University of California at Irvine, and his BA in English from University of California at Berkeley. His research interests focus on nineteenth-century and early American literature, law and literature, critical theory, Melville Studies, and African American literature. In 2012, he won the Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Award for the College of Arts & Sciences.
Dr. Barton is coeditor of Transatlantic Sensations (Routledge, 2012/16) and author of Literary Executions: Capital Punishment & American Culture, 1820-1925 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), Chapter 5 of which won the Hennig Cohen Prize for best Melville Scholarship. He has published numerous book chapters in scholarly collections, including The Routledge Research Companion to Law and Humanities in Nineteenth-Century America (2017), “Yours for Humanity”: New Essays on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (Georgia UP, 2022), and the Elgar Companion on Capital Punishment and Society (2024). Dr. Barton’s essays appear in journals such as American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Law-and-Literature, REAL: Research in English and American Literature, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and Critical Horizons.
Academic Credentials
Ph.D. in English, with an emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine
MA in English, University of California, Irvine
BA in English, University of California, Berkeley
Courses
American literature and African American literature surveys, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Transatlantic Studies, Histories of Reading, Writing, and Publishing, Detective Fiction, and Critical Thinking in the Humanities for the General Education Program.