Aaron D. Shaheen

Aaron D. Shaheen serves as the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His academic focus centers on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, with significant contributions to disability studies, gender studies, southern literature, and World War I literary scholarship. As co-founder of the John Dos Passos Society in 2011, he has organized international conferences in Lisbon, Portugal, and Madrid, Spain, while presenting research in Madeira, Portugal, and São Paulo, Brazil.

Shaheen's research critically examines the intersection of bodily trauma and spatial representation in modern American war literature. His work investigates how prosthetics and cartographic metaphors function as narrative devices for processing war experiences, particularly in authors like Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Nella Larsen. This scholarship reveals persistent patterns in modernist literature where physical and geographical disorientation reflect broader societal fractures following global conflict. His methodology bridges disability theory with spatial criticism to analyze how literature mediates collective trauma through embodied and mapped experiences.

Analysis of Shaheen's publication trends shows a distinct evolution toward spatial criticism, with cartographic analysis becoming central to his recent work on Great War literature. This shift demonstrates how modernist writers used mapping not merely as setting but as active narrative machinery for processing loss and reconstructing identity. His scholarship consistently connects material culture (prosthetics, maps) to abstract concepts of democracy, gender, and national identity, revealing how war literature transforms physical fragmentation into political commentary across the American modernist canon.