Growing up, Mark Seltzer didn't read whodunits, follow heinous crimes in the news or dream of being a detective.

Even today, the newest addition to the English Department has trouble stomaching certain details of real-life homicides.

"It's really disheartening," he said of the prospect of poring over the histories of Jeffrey Dahmer or the Unabomber.

So Seltzer isn't a likely suspect as an authority on serial killers and America's culture of violence. Yet, that's the reputation he earned with his widely acclaimed 1998 book, "Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture."

The holder of a master's degree and a doctorate from UC Berkeley, Seltzer joined the faculty this fall as the first holder of the Evan Frankel Chair in English and American Literature. The chair is funded with a $500,000 gift from the Evan Frankel Foundation, a New York-based charitable organization.

Seltzer comes to UCLA after a two-decade career in Cornell University's English Department. He had been on leave from Cornell, serving as chair of American studies at Berlin's Humbolt University.

The scholar, whose first book dealt with American writer Henry James, will teach turn-of-the-century American literature as well as the contemporary novel, pulp fiction and the cultural fascination with crime as expressed in "true crime" and crime fiction.

Seltzer credited his second book with sparking an interest in serial violence. "Bodies and Machines" examines the way in which human interaction was influenced by the advent of typewriters, lightbulbs and other developments from the second industrial revolution.

"I had no real interest in crime, but I kept coming across gratuitous descriptions of violence and sexual violence around these new technologies," he said.

Seltzer believes that being a serial killer first became "a career option" in the late 19th century, when the explosion of heavy industry and new technology began concentrating strangers in increasingly larger urban centers. The concentration, he believes, caused society to grapple in a new way with matters of identity and identification. He maintains that otherwise unremarkable men turned to committing serial murders as a twisted means of answering the question, "Who am I?"

Americans, in their reaction to these and other horrifying crimes, demonstrate a troubling tendency toward becoming mired in a "wound culture," he argued.

"We don't tend to gather except in reaction to violence or catastrophe," said Seltzer, who will revisit the subject of "wound culture" in a forthcoming book. "We seem to have lost sight of the fact that we might rally around shared civic projects. It's easier for us to find agreement around the negative than the positive."