Christian P Haines

Professional Bio

Christian P. Haines is an associate professor of English at Penn State University. He's also serving as Interim Associate Head of English. His first 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 Genre, Criticism, Cultural Critique, South Atlantic Quarterly, and symplokē, as well as in edited volumes (including The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics and Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn). 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) and the minnesota review ("Is there a place for the commons?" Fall 2019). He's currently writing a book on speculative fiction, capitalism, and ecology, tentatively titled Planetary Fictions, as well as articles on contemporary capitalism, logistics, and the literary genre system.

His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century and contemporary US literature, lyric poetry, Marxism, environmental humanities, continental philosophy, game studies, and utopian studies.

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