Christian P Haines

Professional Bio

Christian P. Haines is the Dorothy W. Gilpatrick University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Professor of English at Penn State University. His book, A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons, was published by Fordham University Press in 2019. His work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Critique, South Atlantic Quarterly, symplokē, and the minnesota review, as well as in edited volumes, including The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures, Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (U of Minnesota Press), and Money and American Literature (Cambridge U Press). He serves as Associate Editor of the journal Utopian Studies and Contributing Editor for Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. He's also co-edited special issues of Cultural Critique ("What Comes After the Subject?", Spring 2017; "Marxism, Form, and Futurity," Summer 2026) and the minnesota review ("Is there a place for the commons?" Fall 2019). He's currently writing a book on speculative fiction, critical theory, and ecology, titled Fear of a Red Planet.

His research and teaching focus on literary and critical theory, American literature, lyric poetry, political economy, utopia, and the environmental humanities.

He also publishes non-academic criticism on literature, games, and popular culture for magazines and websites, such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ancillary Review of Books, Reactor Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Gamers with Glasses.