Cultural Studies Adjunct: Scott Herring
I specialize in queer theory, subcultural studies, and critical regional/rural studies.
While I spend the majority of my time figuring out sexual and social modernity, much of
my current efforts also hover around the intricacies of U.S. urbanism and urbanities. My
first book, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and
Gay History (University of Chicago Press, 2007), tracked how modern artists and writers tweaked the standard formulas of “city mysteries” or “slumming” literatures in order to
undermine the genre’s promise of subcultural revelation. My new project, Another
Country: The Cultural Politics of Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York University Press, under
contract) tackles a complementary metropolitan narrative—the rural-to-urban flight to the
city. The arguments presented in these two book projects have appeared into a number of
articles on queer regionality, metronormativity and visual culture, Willa Cather, Frank
O’Hara, and intra-national modernism. Likewise, they have informed some recent editorial
work on “Reconceiving Regional Modernisms” as well as a new critical edition of Ralph
Werther’s 1918 sexological memoir, Autobiography of an Androgyne.