Education 

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1998

Specialization

Postcolonial literature and theory
Twentieth-Century US literature
Utopia
Historical fiction
Gender studies and feminist theory
Critical race theory
Psychoanalysis

Courses

Global Contemporary Literature
Literary Hauntings: Ghosts, Specters, and Other Undead
Global Capitalism and Literary Form
The American Novel Since 1914
History and Utopia: Global Historical and Speculative/Science Fictions
Postcolonial Historical Fiction
Modern American Literature
Modernist Masculinities

Research Project 

I am currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Capitalism’s Other Times: Fiction, Speculation, and Futurity.” The book examines a cluster of contemporary fictions that I name “speculative realism.” These are works that challenge one of the central myths of too-late capitalism: the myth of our self-enclosure in the present, the idea that all possible or imaginable future worlds are mere extensions of the social system under which we currently live. This sense of self-enclosure has led even radical anti-capitalists to proclaim that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” My book examines novels that show how this statement may once have been useful but must today be challenged if we are to escape the death spiral into which capital has sent us.

The reanimation of our political imaginations begins by grasping the other times that lurk in the apparent closures of our present. It holds open gaps or hollows in the real that trouble the present’s tyrannical claim to permanence and self-identity. For capital today relies both on the ever-expanding colonization of our supposedly “free” time and on the “ongoing conversion” of historical time into “a constant present” (Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 300). It seeks to metabolize and so to eliminate the “countertemporalities” that Massimiliano Tomba has shown belong to those whose resistance to capital disrupts its internal, homogeneous unfolding. (Marx’s Temporalities, 3, 6-7, 18). In the slightly different lexicon of Jonathan Crary, contemporary capital aspires to a world that has been cleansed of “shadows and obscurity” and “alternate temporalities,” “a world identical to itself . . . and thus in principle without specters” (24/7, 19).

The novels I discuss can be seen as efforts to challenge this construal of time. They aim to reclaim the temporal otherness that capital purports to eradicate in its self-presentation as eternal, self-identical, natural, and incontestable. They engage in the imaginative act of resisting “the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of an exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change” (Crary, 24/7, 9). They do so, moreover, not primarily in their content but by inventing forms in which a realist attention to the actual is troubled by the speculative incursion of events that are strictly speaking impossible in our world. Speculative realism thus designates for me a constellation of fictions whose forms mediate an experience of capital’s stifling reduction of the present to self-identity while also retrieving what that reduction banishes as unreal, nonexistent, impossible, and not-now.

Publications 

RECENT AND FORTHCOMING ESSAYS
   • “Artistic Autonomy and the Bonds of Debt: Literature Since the Crisis in Capitalism,” ANGELAKI: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (accepted, revised, and slated for publication in vol. 30 no. 6)
   • “Time After (Postfeminist) Time: Gender, Capital, and Helen Phillips’s The Need,” Diacritics 51.1 (2023): 8-29
   • “Towards the Cli-Fi Historical Novel; or, Climate Futures Past in Recent Fiction,” American Literary History 35.4 (Winter 2023): 1665-1687
   • “Capitalism, Temporality, Precarity: Utopian Form and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature and Theory,” Cultural Critique 117 (Fall 2022): 54-87
   • “Nature, Capitalism, and the Temporalities of Sleep: On Karen Thompson Walker’s The Dreamers,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 63.4: 409-34
   • “World Enough, and Time: Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story with Marcuse, Benjamin, and Chakrabarty,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.1 (2021): 60-79

BOOKS
   • Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction: Atlantic and Other Worlds (Oxford UP, 2019)
   • Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2011)
   • Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel (New York UP, 2000)

ADDITIONAL ESSAYS
   • “James Baldwin’s Joy: Finitude, Carnality, Queer Community,” New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finite, Singular, Exposed, eds. Maria L. López, et. al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2017), 213-30
   • “Atlantic and Other Worlds: Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction,” PMLA 131.5 (October 2016): 1328-43
   • “‘A Good Head and a Better Whip’: Ireland, Enlightenment, and the Body of Slavery in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women,” Slavery and Abolition 37.3 (2016): 521-40 (special issue on Ireland and Atlantic World Slavery, eds. Fionnghuala Sweeney, Fionnuala Dillane, Maria Stewart)
   • “Faulkner and Trauma: On Sanctuary’s Originality,” Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (Cambridge UP, 2015), 92-106
   • “Colonial Trauma, Utopian Carnality, Modernist Form: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory (Palgrave, 2014)
   • “Barry Unsworth and the Arts of Power: Historical Memory, Utopian Fictions,” Contemporary Literature 51.4 (2011): 777-809
   • “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form,” Narrative 15.3 (2007)
   • “Against Melancholia: Contemporary Mourning Theory, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the Politics of Unfinished Grief,” differences 14.2 (2003): 134-70