Linking politics with literature, Cody Marrs (English) examines the relationship between temporal experience and the formation of the United States between the Revolution and Reconstruction. His dissertation, American Velocities: Capital, Slavery, and the Chronopolitics of Early U.S. Literature, compares disparate concepts of time in works by European American writers of the Revolution, African American narrators of slavery, Transcendentalists, and post-Civil War poetry by Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Probing the politics of time, Marrs challenges the accepted notion that nationhood depended on a standardized concept of time in print culture. Instead, Marrs identifies several disparate temporalities in the texts he studies. He attributes these differences to political and social factors, particularly contradictions caused by regional differences, capitalism, slavery, and racial segregation.