University of Pittsburgh
Department of Communication

Ronald J. Zboray

Professor of Communication
Director of Graduate Studies and Director of Public Speaking
Affiliate Faculty in Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies
PhD, American Civilization, New York University

1117-E Cathedral of Learning
Phone: 412-624-6969
E-mail: zboray@pitt.edu

Ronald J. Zboray, one of the first scholars to apply histoire-du-livre approaches to the United States in the 1970s, is widely considered a founder of modern American critical print culture studies. With his collaborator, Mary Saracino Zboray, visiting scholar in communication at Pitt, he investigates the intersections of print production, its dissemination or distribution, and its reception through extensive use of manuscript letters and diaries of 19th-century commonfolk.

In a related project using the same types of sources, the team has also been researching antebellum women’s political consciousness and partisan activism.

On another front, they have been probing into visual representations of race and gender in the nation’s first pictorial magazines and newspapers and in its earliest ethnographic museums in the mid-19th century.

Courses Taught

Selected Publications

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socio-Literary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2006.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Between ‘Crockery-dom’ and Barnum: Boston’s Chinese Museum, 1845-1847.” American Quarterly, 56(2), 271-307. June 2004.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Cannonballs and Books: Reading and the Disruption of Social Ties on the New England Homefront.” In The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War, ed. Joan Cashin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, 237-261.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Home Libraries and the Institutionalization of Everyday Practice in Antebellum New England.” American Studies, Special Issue on Culture and Libraries, 42(3), 63-86. Fall 2001. Reprinted in Libraries as Agencies of Culture, ed. Thomas Augst and Wayne Wiegand. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, 63-86.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, A Handbook for the Study of Book History in the United States. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Center for the Book, 2000.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Gender Slurs in Boston's Partisan Press During the 1840s.” Journal of American Studies, 34(December 2000), 413-445.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Transcendentalism in Print: Production, Dissemination, and Common Reception.” In Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999, 310-381.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “The Mysteries of New England: Eugene Sue’s ‘Imitators,’ 1844,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 22(3), 457-492. September 2000.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “The Romance of Fisherwomen in Antebellum New England.” American Studies, 39(Spring 1998), 5-30.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “The Boston Book Trades, 1789-1850: A Statistical and Geographical Analysis.” In Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700-1850, ed. Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1997, 210-267.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Reading and Everyday Life in Antebellum Boston: The Diary of Daniel F. and Mary G. Child.” Libraries and Culture, 32(Summer 1997), 285-323.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of 1840: Three Perspectives from Massachusetts.” Journal of the Early Republic, 17(Summer 1997), 279-314.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Have You Read...?: Real Readers and Their Responses in Antebellum Boston and Its Region." Nineteenth-Century Literature, 52(September 1997), 139-170.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Political News and Female Readership in Antebellum Boston and Its Region,” Journalism History, 22(Spring 1996), 2-14.

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Books, Reading, and the World of Goods in Antebellum New England.” American Quarterly, 48(December 1996), 587-622.

Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Ronald J. Zboray, “Technology and the Character of Community Life in Antebellum America: The Role of Story Papers.” In Communication and Change in American Religious History, ed. Leonard I. Sweet. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1993, 185-215.

Candace Falk, Ronald J. Zboray, Alice Hall, and others, eds., The Emma Goldman Papers[70 reels]. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, Inc., 1990; Guide, 1995.

Ronald J. Zboray, “Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation.” American Quarterly (special issue titled, "Reading America"), 40, 65-82. 1988.

Ronald J. Zboray, "The Transportation Revolution and Antebellum Book Distribution Reconsidered," American Quarterly, 38, 53-71. 1986.

Ronald J. Zboray, “The Railroad, the Community, and the Book,” Southwest Review, 71, 474-487. 1986.

Ronald J. Zboray, “The Real and the Realistic in Down to the Sea in Ships.” Film and History, 10, 49-54. 1980.

Links

Curriculum vitae (PDF)

Faculty