Ingrid Norton works on long nineteenth-century American literature and its twentieth- and twenty-first-century legacies. She is interested in collective memory and the ways that American writers recall and reshape the recent past through fiction. Norton's other main preoccupation is the shifting boundaries between the secular, the sacred, and the supernatural in American literature and culture, from the nineteenth century to the present. Norton also has a strong interest in the ethical and emotional stakes of stories. She has lectured and written on subjects from bereavement in World War I literature to the coverage of the September 11 attacks. She is interested in intellectual history and thematic, cross-historical approaches to the study of literature. Norton is a fellow of “Material Economies of Religion in the Americas,” a Henry Luce Foundation-funded initiative that brings together interdisciplinary scholars who work on religion and visual culture in the Americas.

She joined the English department in 2016 after doing a master's in religion and literature at Harvard Divinity School. She received her B.A. in history and philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.

Norton is also a fiction writer and literary journalist. Her essays and short stories have appeared in publications such as Boston Review, Dissent, Litro, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Open Letters Monthly, and The Saint Ann's Review.