George Bain Hutchinson is an American scholar who is currently the Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture and George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Cornell University. He is also Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He is a professor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and African American literature and culture. In addition to this, Hutchinson is the author of several books on American and African American literary history and is a recipient of both the NEH and Guggenheim Fellowships.
Raised in Indianapolis, Hutchinson has cited his motherâÂÂs interest in cultural traditions and his geologist grandfatherâÂÂs work as potential early influences on his historical perspectives. He has stated that reading the poetry of Walt Whitman alongside Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson in high school inspired his passion for literature. He has said that Whitman's work in particular "lit him on fire" during his college years.
He graduated from Brown University with an A.B. in American Civilization in 1975. At Brown, he was a member of the varsity crew, serving as captain in 1975 and participating in the 1973 Intercollegiate Rowing Association championships.
Hutchinson served in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso from 1975 to 1977, organizing manual well-digging projects. He later wrote that the experience changed his expectations about development work. While in Burkina Faso, he read Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism. These essays altered Hutchinson's perspective on property rights and their relation to individual rights more generally, not to mention capitalist democracy itself. During his service, Hutchinson's appearanceâÂÂincluding long hair described by locals as 'ghostly'âÂÂcontributed to a sense of being a cultural outsider, an experience he later noted as potentially influential to his scholarly work.
Hutchinson graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a Ph.D. in English and American Studies in 1983 and taught at the University of Tennessee from 1982 to 2000. He chaired the American Studies Program from 1987 to 2000 and held the Kenneth Curry Chair in English from 1999 to 2000. During this time, he served as President of the Knoxville Rowing Association and assisted in the establishment of the university's first women's varsity crew.
In 1986, The Ohio State Press published Hutchinson's first monograph, The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism & the Crisis of the Union, which applied anthropological theories of shamanism to Walt WhitmanâÂÂs Civil War-era poetry. Hutchinson has maintained a scholarly engagement with the poetry of Whitman over several decades, beginning with a publication in the Walt Whitman Review in 1980 through to his contribution to the 2014 volume Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet. He also authored entries in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia and has reviewed numerous monographs on the poet for academic journals.
Published by Harvard University Press in 1995, Hutchinson's second monograph, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, argued that the Harlem Renaissance was actually a composite, interracial cultural event that was at the center of modernism rather than a self-contained Black movement.
In 1993-4 and 1998, Hutchinson was Visiting Professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn. He was the Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies at Indiana University Bloomington from 2000 to 2012.
In 2006, Harvard University Press published Hutchinson's third monograph, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, which presented a positive reinterpretation of Larsen's life and work and positioned her as a conscious modernist.
In 2013, Hutchinson joined Cornell University as the Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture, where he is also George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. At Cornell, his teaching and research focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture, with particular attention to race in American culture, African American literature, and literary ecology. From 2016 to 2021, he held a faculty fellowship from Cornell's Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. He co-organized the Environmental Humanities Lecture Series (2017âÂÂ2018) and hosted events on literature and environmental justice.
Hutchinson's fourth monograph, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, was a revisionist study that challenged the idea of the 1940s as a "neglected" or merely "patriotic" decade. It was published by Columbia University Press in 2018.
In 2019, Hutchinson edited the Penguin Classics edition of Jean Toomer's composite novel, Cane (novel), providing a new introduction, explanatory notes, and suggestions for further reading. The edition was selected as an Editor's Choice by The New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of the forthcoming biography Jean Toomer: Writer for a New America, scheduled for publication by Yale University Press on August 18, 2026, as part of the press's Black Lives series of biographies of influential figures of African descent.
Hutchinson was 1988 and 1989 NEH Fellow. He was also a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.
Hutchinson was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History in 2006 for The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, which was also a finalist for the Anne Rea Jewell Non-Fiction Prize of The Boston Book Review in 1996. At a 2021 lecture given by Hutchinson at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Henry Louis Gates Jr. referred to the monograph as "the bible on the Harlem Renaissance."
In Search of Nella Larsen won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa and Bronze Medal Independent Publisher Book Award for Biography in 2007 and was listed by The Washington Post and Booklist as one of the best Nonfiction books of 2006. It was also selected as an Editors' Choice by NYTBR and as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine.
Hutchinson was voted winner for his defense of English in a lifeboat debate organized by The Cornell University Philosophy Club & Undergraduate Journal (LOGOS) in 2013. He argued that language is the most fundamental instrument for civilization, enabling individuals to construct belief systems, foster solidarity through imagination, and navigate existential questions.
Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award in 2019 and won Honorable Mention for the Matei CÃÂlinescu Prize of the MLA, awarded for what the association describes as distinguished scholarship on 20th and 21st century literature and thought.
Hutchinson's 2019 edition of Jean Toomer's Cane was an Editors' Choice of NYTBR.