Samuel Otter has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. He served as department chair from 2009 to 2012. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close textual interpretation also can be deep and wide.
He has published Melville’s Anatomies (California, 1999), an analysis of how Melville, in his long fiction of the 1840s and 1850s, portrayed the ways in which meanings, particularly racial meanings, were abstracted from human bodies. In Philadelphia Stories (Oxford, 2010), he examined narratives about race, character, manners, violence, and freedom in a range of works produced about Philadelphia and its “free” African American communities between 1790 and 1860. These works regarded the city as a social laboratory in which possible futures for a post-slavery United States would be tested. He currently is working on a book titled Melville’s Forms, assessing the entire career (long and short fiction, poetry, and prose/poetry experiments), in which he considers what Melville meant by, and so what 21st-century literary critics might more precisely mean by, the tiny, crucial term "form."
He has co-edited Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (North Carolina, 2008) and Melville and Aesthetics (Palgrave, 2011). He was the editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (2014-2019) and has served on the editorial boards of American Literature, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Nineteenth-Century Literature, PMLA, and Representations. His essays have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, Representations, and Raritan.
In recent years, he has taught the English Department's Honors course for senior English majors; undergraduate seminars on Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, American Transcendentalism, Edgar Allan Poe, and Moby-Dick; lecture courses on American literature before 1800 and American literature 1800-1865; the department’s introduction to graduate study; and graduate seminars on the literature of Civil War and Reconstruction, nineteenth-century U.S. historical poetics, Melville and questions of literary form, and transatlantic literature from the late 18th- to the mid-19th centuries.