Dr. Cameron Seglias is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies. He completed his PhD in 2022 at the Freie Universität Berlin, and holds an MA from the Freie Universität Berlin and a BA from Bard College.

Dr. Seglias's first book, Settling Debt: Antislavery and Colonial Crisis (Cornell University Press, 2026), argues that early antislavery literature was not exclusively about enslavement. Examining the bonds between antislavery writing, Protestant millennialism, early modern political economy, and settler colonialism, his book shows how struggles for freedom under capitalism are often framed by literal and metaphorical conceptions of indebtedness and private property. Research for this project was supported by fellowships from the German Research Foundation, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Drawing on recent work in queer and religious studies, Dr. Seglias's second book project, tentatively entitled Fluid: Sex, the Secular, and the Queer Arts of Excess, will explore the surprising and complex entanglements between secularization, the history of sexuality, and literary form between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. Individual chapters focus on works by Henry James, Djuna Barnes, H.D., Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Samuel R. Delany, among others.

Works in progress include essays on topics as diverse as poetry and translation, the ultra-radical and abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, the cultural history of evolutionary theory, and the painter Paul Cadmus. Recent and forthcoming work has appeared/will appear in Early American Literature, Journal of Early American History, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and H-Soz-Kult.

Research and teaching interests include abolition, American religions, the history of capitalism, early America, poetry and poetics, queer studies, secularism, settler colonialism, and the history of sexuality.