In Memoriam

We share the profound sadness of the ASA community brought by the news of Professor Amy Kaplan's passing on July 30, 2020. Few other scholars of her generation have made as broad an impact on the field at large, and so many of us are deeply indebted to Professor Kaplan's brilliant scholarship, generous mentoring, and principled advocacy. Her extensive writing included The Social Construction of American Realism (1988), which incisively demonstrated how literary realism constructed rather than merely reflected conflict and change in the modern capitalist world. It was her introductory essay to the groundbreaking collection Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), which she coedited with Donald E. Pease, that turned the attention of a great many scholars to how the historiography of American studies is undergirded by the history of US empire-building and the absence of attention to it. Along with this collection, her 2002 monograph, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, played a decisive role in making empire a central analytic in American studies and in the field's transnational turn. Serving as ASA president in 2003–4 amid the US invasion of Iraq, Professor Kaplan used her expertise and influence to urge scholars both at home and abroad to challenge the narratives that the US empire tells about itself. In her final book, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (2018), she presented a bold examination of the US relationship with Israel, drawing on her own radical transformation through her study of the history of the US, Israel, and Palestine. Professor Kaplan's influence and impact on countless scholars and her legacies in the field are vast and will resonate for years to come.