The College of

Arts and Sciences

 

PhD, UCLA

 

Areas of Interest

• Modern & contemporary fiction

• Critical theory (post-structuralism, modernism/postmodernism, Marxism, globalization studies)

• Science fiction & fantasy

• Science studies

• Music & literature 

Recent Courses Taught

• Surveys of Science Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, & Horror Fiction

• Disease, Drugs, & DNA: Science Fact & Science Fiction in the 20^th Century

• Global Fiction Since WWII

• Jazz, Blues, & African American Literature

• Literary Obscenity

• Apocalyptic Fiction

Selected Publications

Books:

• William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023)

• Antonio Negri: Modernity and the Multitude (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)

• Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1997) - named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1998

Translated Books, Edited Books & Special Journal Issues:

• Translation editor and introducer of Luisa Muraro, The Symbolic Order of the Mother (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018)

• Special issue co-editor (with Benjamin Noys) of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 49:2 (July 2016), Old and New Weird

• Translator of Antonio Negri, Flower of the Desert: Giacomo Leopardi’s Poetic Ontology (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015)

• Symposium co-editor (with Giuseppina Mecchia) of Theory and Event 18:4 (October 2015), Futures of Empire

• Special issue editor of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 46: 2 (summer 2013), Homo Liber: Essays in Honor of Antonio Negri; Korean translation forthcoming

• Translator of Antonio Negri, Trilogy of Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) – nominated for the Aldo & Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation

• Special issue co-editor (with Ronald Schleifer) of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture XLIII: 3-4 (fall/winter 2010), Needful Things: Translations of Media, Language and Culture

• Co-editor (with Abdul-Karim Mustapha) of The Philosophy of Antonio Negri Volume 2: Revolution in Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2007)

• Special issue co-editor/translator (with Max Henninger and Giuseppina Mecchia) of Sub-Stance 112 (36:1 [2007]), Post-Workerist Thought

• Editor/co-translator (with Arianna Bove, Ed Emery and Francesca Novello) of Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (London: Verso, 2005)

• Co-editor (with Abdul-Karim Mustapha) of The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2005); Korean translation published by Galmuri, Seoul, 2010

• Editor/translator of Antonio Negri, Subversive Spinoza: (Un)Contemporary Variations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004)

• Special issue editor of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture XXXIII: 3-4 (fall/winter 2000), Desert Island Texts

• Special issue co-editor (with Robert Smith and Roy Sellars) of Angelaki 3:2, The Love of Music (1998)

Book Chapters & Journal Articles, 2005-present: 

• “Eye of the Kaiju: The Anthropomorphizing Gaze in Shin Godzilla” in Science Fiction Film and Television, forthcoming fall 2023

• “Cat and Housefly: Unhuman Umwelten and Punitive Fantastika in M. John Harrison’s Fiction” in Extrapolation 63: 2 (2022), pp.205-227.

• "It Might Have Been a Million Years Later: Abyssal Time in William Hope Hodgson's Weird Fiction" in Studies in the Fantastic 9, summer/fall 2020, special issue on Weird Temporalities, pp.63-100

• "William Morris and the Counter-Tradition of Materialist Fantasy" in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 30: 3 (2019, published 2020), pp.312-330

• "Labor of the Weird: William Hope Hodgson's Fantastic Materialism" in Science Fiction Studies 138, vol.46: 2 (July 2019), pp.225-249

• "Interference Zones: William Burroughs in the Interstices of Globalization" in Joan Hawkins & Alex Wermer-Colan, eds., William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp.177-183

• "I Play for You Who Refuse to Understand Me: Demetrio Stratos and Area in the Crucible of Seventies Italy" in Journal of Popular Music Studies 30: 4 (December 2018), pp.143-160

• "Physiology is Destiny: The Fate of Eugenic Utopia in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Olaf Stapledon" in Utopian Studies 29: 1 (2018), pp.21-43

• "Supremely Monstrous Thought: H.P. Lovecraft and the Weirding of World Literature" in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 49:2 (July 2016), Old and New Weird
  

• “How (Not) to Translate an Unidentified Narrative Object or a New Italian Epic” in Natalia Rulyova and Garin Dowd, eds., Genre Trajectories: Identifying, Mapping, Projecting (New York: Palgrave, 2015), pp.109-129

• “The Test is Company: A Deleuzian Speculation on Beckett’s Sociendum” in Stephen Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskate, eds., Deleuze and Beckett (New York: Palgrave, 2015), pp.111-134

• “The Risk of Subjectivity: Negri Beyond Adorno” in Antonio Calcagno, ed., Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), pp.243-269

• “Co-Research, Collaboration, Commonwealth” in Giuseppina Mecchia & Murphy, eds., Futures of Empire, a symposium in Theory and Event 18: 4 (October 2015)

•  “Introduction” to Antonio Negri, Pipeline: Letters from Prison (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), pp.1-12

• “Self-Nomination and Autonomy: A Reply to Ben Trott” in Global Discourse 3:3-4 (2014), pp.426-429; reprinted in Matthew Johnson, ed., Precariat: Labour, Work and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2014)

• “Pathogenesis, Financialization, and the Politics of Time” in Óscar García Agustín & Christian Ydesen, eds., Post-Crisis Perspectives: The Common and Its Powers (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), pp.143-159

• “Flower of the Desert: Poetics as Ontology from Leopardi to Negri” in Genre 44: 1 (spring 2011), pp.75-91; Japanese translation in Yutaka Nagahara, ed., Restoration of Political Economy and Political Philosophy (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 2011), pp.293-320

• “The Workerist Matrix: Introduction to Tronti and Cacciari” in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture XLIII: 3-4 (fall/winter 2010), Needful Things: Translations of Media, Language and Culture, pp.327-336

• “Random Insect Doom: The Pulp Science Fiction of Naked Lunch”in Oliver Harris & Ian MacFadyen, eds., Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), pp.223-232

• “The Negation of a Negation Fixed in a Form: Luigi Nono and the Italian Counter-culture 1964-1979” in Cultural Studies Review XI: 2 (September 2005), pp.95-109 

Honors & Offices

• Treasurer, Science Fiction Research Association, 2022-2024

• General Editor, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 2000-2013

• Executive Editor, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (winner, 1996 Best New Journal Award given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals), 1993-Present

• Series Editor, Angelaki Humanities, published by Manchester University Press, 1998-Present

• English Translation Coordinator of the Deleuze Web, http://www.webdeleuze.com,1996-2003

• Site Manager (with Robert Thomas) of the “Amnesty for Antonio Negri” website 1997-2003

• MLA Division Delegate for Philosophical Approaches to Literature, 2002-2004

• Director of Graduate Studies, University of Oklahoma Department of English, 2006-2010

Current Research

A survey of the Godzilla media franchise from its origin in 1954 to the present, tentatively titled Godzilla, King of Kaiju

 

A critical introduction to Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 science-fiction novel Star Maker