Current Faculty Research in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture

Click on each faculty name to view his or her personal webpage.

Purnima Bose - After receiving her degree in Comparative Literature (University of Texas, 1993), Purnima Bose joined the English faculty at Indiana University. In addition to her appointment in the English Department, Bose is the director of the Cultural Studies Program and an adjunct faculty member in American Studies, Comparative Literature, and India Studies. Her book Organizing Empire (Duke 2003), examines colonial, Irish and Indian feminist and nationalist constructions of individualism and collective agency. Bose’s articles on South Asian feminism, nationalism, and globalization have appeared in Genders, Passages, Concerns, and Haunting Violations. Her co-authored essays with Laura E. Lyons on colonial personnel circuits and corporate globalization have appeared in boundary 2 and Against the Current. She serves on the editorial board of Genders, SAMAR (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection), and SAGAR (South Asia Graduate Research Journal).

Judith Brown - Judith Brown is finishing a book on "glamour" in modernist literature that looks at glamour as an aesthetic category specific to the twentieth century. Her work considers the glamorization of the primitive, same-sex desire, and death in the early decades of the century and proposes a lineage that explains the effects of glamour on its object and viewing subject. She is particularly interested in those authors who pursue the contemporary sublime in their work, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, William Faulkner and Wallace Stevens. Her theoretical interests include visual culture, post-structuralism and the various identity studies (queer, gender, race) that emerge from it. Brown teaches courses in modernism and other twentieth-century literatures. Graduate courses have included, or will include, a consideration of the "nothing" that drives modernism ("Regarding Nothing"), twentieth-century expressions of the sublime ("Sublime Variations"), and the technological framing of the primitive in the early twentieth century ("Modern Primitive").

Edward Comentale - Most of my work is concerned with the relations between modernist aesthetics and cultural production, particularly the ways in which twentieth-century art objects serve to reinforce, transform, or confound the flows of the marketplace. Always, then, my work begins with materialism, with the material dimensions of modernist production and modernist thought; I find it essential to avoid political generalizations about modernism and instead consider its activity as it remains restricted by local factors such as economic development, class boundaries, gendered ideologies, and national borders. For me, modernism is not so much a unified set of ideas or a group of unconscious tendencies, but an embedded practice, an embodied movement through a physically and ideologically structured landscape. The moderns must be understood in terms of how they engage local networks of established and evolved meanings; their work must be seen as neither expressive nor descriptive, but radically engaged, challenging the codes by which society produces and reproduces itself. My first book, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 2004), focuses on early versions of the avant-garde as they emerged out of rapidly industrializing European nations; it explores coteries such as the Futurists, the Vorticists, the Imagists, and Bloomsbury as they considered the renewed possibility of aesthetic value and explored the work of art insofar as it lays bare its difficult construction and positioning within the modern world. More recently, I’ve tried to push this discussion into the later twentieth-century, turning to more popular art forms and exploring the public kinds of engagement they effect. Recent articles on William Faulkner, Ian Fleming, The Coen Brothers, and Bob Dylan have allowed me to consider the ongoing legacy of modernist aesthetics, the use of avant-garde strategies in popular forms and their proliferation by means of modern technologies, such as the record player, the cd, and film.

Margo Natalie Crawford - Trained in Yale University’s American Studies program, I was introduced to the field of African American literature through the intersecting lenses of cultural studies and comparative ethnic studies. The openness of the field continues to excite me. My upcoming conference presentations display the expansiveness of the field. At the 2005 Modernist Studies Association, a paper entitled “ From The New Negro to Negro: Race, Space and Time” will be delivered in the panel “ Framing the Modern: Anthologies of Race and Modernism.” At the 2006 Porter Colloquium (an art history conference at Howard University), a paper entitled “Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus” will address the poetry and visual culture of the Black Arts Movement. At the 2006 MLA, my analysis of Paradise and Jazz will be a part of a panel exploring Toni Morrison’s trilogy. In spite of the foundational theoretical frameworks that have been developed, the field remains remarkably fluid. My interest in both body politics and cultural movements has convinced me that my larger challenge is now the simultaneous immersion in “race and psychoanalysis” (my preferred body politics framework) and cultural studies. On the meta-level, I study representations of race, gender, and sexuality in twentieth-century African American literature and culture. My work is currently situated in comparisons of “race and American modernism,” the 1960s and 70s Black Arts Movement, and contemporary African American literature. I am the coeditor of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement which includes my study of the nexus of skin color fetishism, subversive primitivism, and racialized homoeroticism. Rewriting Blackness: Beyond Authenticity and Hybridity (2006) extends my interest in this nexus as I focus on a wide range of authors including Faulkner, Stein, Baldwin, Morrison, and Wideman.

Jennifer L. Fleissner - Jennifer L. Fleissner focuses her research on American literature and culture from the late 19th through the early 20th centuries. Her current projects include “Novel Appetites: Eating and Meaning in Modernizing America,” which looks at eating as a means of self-formation and boundary crossing in various writers from this transitional era (such as James, Chesnutt, Cahan, and Yezierska), and “Maladies of the Will,” a more temporally sprawling endeavor that asks about the pathologies and uncertainties that result from modernity's dual conceptualization of persons as wholly self-willing and unprecedentedly determined by internal and external forces. She has two forthcoming articles related to this latter project: “Obsessional Modernity: The 'Institutionalization of Doubt,'” coming out in Critical Inquiry, which looks at the flurry of representations of obsessive-compulsive behavior in recent fiction, TV, and film in relation both to historical depictions of these symptoms and to the humanities/sciences divide; and “Poe's Imp, Melville's Formula,” in the journal Fictions, a reading of ideés fixes in Poe's “Imp of the Perverse” and Melville's “Bartleby.”

She also has an ongoing interest in women as emblems of modernity (a major theme of her first book, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism [U. of Chicago Press 2004]) and has a couple of pieces coming out on this subject as well. “The Biological Clock: Wharton, Naturalism, and the Temporality of Womanhood,” to appear in American Literature, is part of an ongoing investigation into figures of technologized women in the modern era; and a contribution to the Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, 1900-1950 will focus on the modern woman's story as it takes shape in often neglected “middlebrow” American writers from this era such as Edna Ferber, Robert Grant, Jessie Fauset, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Booth Tarkington, and Zona Gale.

Back in the day, she also published a lot of record reviews in such venues as Spin, The Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Minneapolis Citypages.

Susan Gubar - My current projects include revising the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women for its third edition and collaborating with Sandra Gilbert on a new Norton Reader of Feminist Criticism and Theory. I continue to read and write about Virginia Woolf, but I am also embarked on a rather eccentric biography of Judas from the Gospels through to Renaissance painting, Enlightenment philosophy, and contemporary fiction and film. A long-term project engages me in collecting verse composed in English about the Holocaust.

George Hutchinson - My focus for the past fifteen years has been on American modernism and African American literature, although I started out as an American Renaissance scholar and have never abandoned my first love Walt Whitman. I teach courses in modern American poetry, African American literature, interracial literature, Modern American Literature, and the Harlem Renaissance. My last book, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, is a large-scale intellectual and cultural history of American cultural nationalism, pragmatist philosophy, modernist anthropology, modernist magazine and book publishing, and the formation of an African American literary field. More to the point, it takes aim at the tendency to scapegoat interracial relationships or suppress the history of their contribution to American and African American modernisms. I have just completed a "biography of the color line" in the form of a life of Nella Larsen and her world, as well as of the current culture of the color line in the institutions of knowledge and criticism that have held her hostage. "To write the life of Nella Larsen," I argue, "is to write a biography of color line culture by way of what that culture hides." It will come out in the spring of 2006 from the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. I am also editing The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance and co-editing books on Whitman and Black America, and on African American literature and editorial theory.

Joshua Kates - Joshua Kates’ work focuses on the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, and literature in the second half of the 20 th century. Rooted in a deep acquaintance with German phenomenology and its French appropriation, Kates’ projects include a revisionist interpretation of Derridean deconstruction, an interrogation of the theorization of the relation between history and literature, and, most recently, an investigation of the notion of the human and the status of modernity as these have been thematized (or failed to be thematized) in the literature, literary theory, and philosophy of the last 30 years.

De Witt Douglas Kilgore - My general field is twentieth century American literature and culture. I am particularly concerned with exploring the political (utopian) hopes expressed by our society through its projects in science and technology. Race, as both a social and an analytic category, stands for what is most often at stake in the histories I engage and the readings I produce. My first book, Astrofuturism: Science, Race and Visions of Utopia in Space, is an incisive engagement with the science writing and science fiction produced by the modern spaceflight movement. As a history it takes seriously the (sometimes progressive) hopes of those scientists and engineers who wrote the space age into being as a great cultural project. As a critique it turns a cold eye on those narratives of disciplined futurism to which I, as an ordinary native of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, was (and still am) vulnerable. My general research agenda is to recoup the liberatory potential of sciences and narratives ordinarily prescribed as closed to non-white, non-male, non-middle-class people. (Have I covered it all? By no means, the exclusions one might consider are finite but unbounded. Race, however, is a commodious term in which much else is implicated).

My current project is concerned with philosophical and social narratives emerging from SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), a relatively new science founded by astronomers and astrophysicists in the late 1950s. SETI science brings my research down to earth, so to speak, focusing on the expressive work of writer-scientists who explore the universe from home, building both new knowledge and the audiences for it. This work follows the general thrust of Astrofuturism in that it exploits my fascination with the process of how new sciences emerge that speak from and to the cultural circumstances and political imperatives of our time. However, my concern in this work is less with the making of the future (even though this is never far away) and more with the genesis, structure and meaning of the evolutionary narratives we employ to explain its emergence. If we can sustain disciplined arguments in the existence of life and intelligence elsewhere then how do we search for it and why? What effect would it have on us to encounter an actually alien race, a species unrelated to our biology and history, who could talk (and, perhaps answer) back? On what basis could we understand one another? How would such a discovery effect “our” persistent claims of privilege in cultural and natural life? Would human beings mature, even follow the lead of older, wiser beings to some blessed age? Would we fail instead, having been removed as the pinnacle of creation, falling into extinction? As it argues for its place SETI asks these questions and proposes extrapolations worthy of thought. It should not be surprising that the hypothetical scenarios produced within SETI are a consequence and, in some cases, a self-conscious dissent from the legacy of terrestrial exploration. Therefore, it is the historical tradition of race and empire that sets the stage for SETI and sparks my engagement with this interaction between science and literature.

My teaching is divided between my core area of science and literature and more traditional courses in twentieth century American literature. Currently I am teaching a Ph. D. seminar on the function and implications of evolutionary narrative in robotics, artificial intelligence and SETI. Recent graduate courses include general surveys in science fiction, fantasy and utopian literature. These classes are as much about British initiatives in these genres as they are about American traditions. In speculative literatures, as in science, national borders exist but are not able to contain influence and exchange. For undergraduates I teach classes in twentieth century American and African-American fiction, mostly around urban literature and culture. And, naturally, courses in science fiction and science fiction cinema. Future plans include courses in African American writing in science fiction and fantasy, African American film, visual culture (i.e. comic books and graphic novels), science writing, and American Studies.

Ranu Samantrai - I came to IU's English Department after years of teaching in a graduate program in cultural studies. My graduate teaching focuses on intellectual history, particularly on developments in the latter half of the twentieth century: poststructuralism and its implications for critical theory, postcolonial and critical race studies, gender theory, and ethics. At the undergraduate level my teaching thus far has focused on twentieth-century British literature, with generous helpings of historical and philosophical texts that establish the context for understanding significant literary developments. Positioned at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, my scholarship combines textual analysis with extra-literary objects of analysis. My field is contemporary (post-WWII) Britain, and I conduct research on the impact of immigrant diasporas, the growing black and Asian British population, and changing gender relations. In my book, AlterNatives, I used the black British women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s to investigate the formation of a post-imperial Britain and to argue for the benefits of the conflicts and dissensions that characterize postcolonial societies. My new work takes a more explicitly aesthetic turn by attending to the literary and visual art of black and Asian Britishers, again framed by issues of nationalism and pluralism. It also explores the modernist roots and aesthetic predilections of postcolonial and diaspora theory. I have published as well on questions of democracy, pluralism and ethics, as well as essays on the Anglophone literatures of Africa, India, and their diasporas.

Shane Vogel - My research and teaching interests focus broadly on performance studies, modern drama, queer studies, and critical theory. I have offered graduate seminars on “Performance and Performativity” and “Intimacy and Alienation in Modern American Drama,” and teach undergraduate courses on American and European dramatic literature, critical theory, and performance studies. I am currently completing a book about the relationship between cabaret performance and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Through a focus on performers, authors, and the spaces where they interact, I argue that Harlem's “cabaret school” of literature and poetry constituted a subterranean tradition within the Harlem Renaissance that contributed to the formation, deformation, and reformation of sexual, criminal, and racialized subjects.

Stephen Watt - My major research interests include Irish culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, drama and theatre, and higher education, especially the discipline of English and graduate studies. At present, I am working on a book based on the at times ghostly presence of Samuel Beckett in contemporary Irish writing. I plan chapters on Brian Friel, Bernard MacLaverty, Paul Muldoon, and others, as well as a discussion of Beckett and contemporary Irish drama more broadly. I am also interested in literature of the Cold War period of the 20th century, from Beat poetry to Ian Fleming’s 007 books.