John Cyril Barton earned his B.A. in English from University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in English (with an emphasis in critical theory) from University of California, Irvine. Dr. Barton joined the English Department at UMKC in the fall of 2005. He teaches a range of classes in American literature, critical theory, and African American literature. Dr. Barton is coauthor of Transatlantic Sensations (Routledge/Ashgate, 2012) and author of Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820-1925 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Chapter 5 of which won the Hennig Cohen Prize for best scholarship on Herman Melville. He has also published numerous essays in both scholarly books and academic journals, such as Nineteenth-Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Law and Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Critical Horizons, and REAL.
Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine