Areas of Specialization
Theory and Cultural Studies
English Department Faculty Specializations: Theory and Cultural Studies
Many of us engage directly and substantially with schools of theory and/or Cultural Studies in our scholarship as well as in our graduate and undergraduate teaching and our thesis advising. Our theoretical interests include critical theory, postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, feminist and queer theories, critical race theory, disability theory, postcolonial theory, avant-garde theory, and of course literary theory. Our range in Cultural Studies extends to cultural studies of science and technology, aesthetics and cultural studies, feminist cultural studies, film studies, reception theory, cultural policy studies, Latino/a cultural studies, and visual culture. Many of us are involved in theory-driven intra- and interdepartmental initiatives. Click on the following faculty names to access individual academic biographies: Michael Bérubé, Robert Caserio, Richard Doyle, Jennifer Edbauer, Jonathan Eburne, Cheryl Glenn, Scott Herring, Jane Juffer, Brian Lennon, Janet Lyon, Jeffrey Nealon, Aldon Nielsen, Susan Squier, Rachel Teukolsky, Paul Youngquist.
Recent English department graduate seminars have included:
- Studies in Theory: Foucault
- Studies in Theory: Derrida
- Post-Postmodernism
- Introduction to Visual Culture
- Introduction to Social Thought
- The Body Shop: Liberalism and Cultural Theory
- Theory v. Theory
- Modernity
- Histories and Historiographies of Rhetoric
- Theories of Feminism
- Queer Modernism
- Writing Nonfiction: Defacement
- Sexologies: An Introduction to Sex Studies
- Spaces of Culture
- Cultural Policy Studies
- Latino/a Cultural Studies
- Sex in Space: Feminist Media Studies
- Introduction to Disability Studies
- What Was Cultural Studies?
- Theories of Reading
- Black to the Future: Afro-Futurisms
- Edward Said and C.L.R. James
- Feminist Science Studies
- Literature, Medicine and Culture
- Spectacular Technoscience: Images and the Theatre of Scientific Change
- Building the Multiple: A Seminar in A Thousand Plateaus
Recent faculty book titles include:
The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Bérubé); Darwin's Pharmacy (Doyle); On Beyond Living (Doyle); Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Glenn); Single Mother: The New Domestic Intellectual (Juffer); At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (Juffer); Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Lyon); The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities Arts, and Social Sciences (Nealon); Rethinking the Frankfurt School (Nealon); Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Nealon); Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism (Nielsen); C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction (Nielsen); Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (Squier); Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Squier); Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Youngquist)
Faculty essays have appeared recently in: Cultural Critique; SubStance; Symploke; Cultural Studies; South Atlantic Quarterly; Callaloo; African American Review; Cross Cultural Poetics; Postmodern Culture; the minnesota review; Parallax; GLQ; Modernism/modernity; Configurations; Theory and Event; Rhetoric and Gender; Geomodernisms; Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite; Genetics, Disability and Deafness; New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Related recent dissertation topics include :
White Trash Discourses: Literature, Social Science, and Poor White Subjectivity
Cadent Silence: Technology, Figure, and Ethics in Contemporary Literature
The Ethos of Affect: Contemporary Theory and Rhetoric
Technologies of Truth: The Embodiment of Deception Detection
Aberration and Adaptation: Normative Embodiment and the Nineteenth-Century British Stage
Technologies of a Mountain: Cultural Inscriptions of Mount Everest
Rhetorics of Time: Women's Role in Wartime Science, 1939-1945
Virginia Woolf and Astronomy
The Cultural Work of Corporations
Arguing Artificially: Understanding the Debates That Have Shaped Cognitive Science
H. G. Wells and Artificial Intelligence
Disability Studies, Literature and Medicine
American Documentary in Daily Life
The Future of Rhetorical Invention
