Work in Progress
- I am working on a larger book project on what I call contemporary literature's 'grammar of valuation.' This book aims to develop a new account of the way literary value is produced, articulated, and circulated in relation to non-literary value domains, and how this 'grammar of valuation' shapes the dominant forms of contemporary literature. Authors I discuss include W.G. Sebald, Karl-Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Teju Cole, Jonathan Franzen, Colum MCCann, George Saunders, Valeria Luiselli, Ben Lerner.
- As a kind of spin-off of this monograph project, I am the PI on a project entitled 'Harlem, Capital of World Literature? James Baldwin's 21st-Century Career and the Dynamics of World Literature.' This project develops an in-depth study of the twenty-first century consecration of James Baldwin as a transnational literary and political figure. Looking at the role of tourism, film, anthologies, intertextuality, politics, and other value domains, the project has a double aim: to arrive at an comprehensive account of Baldwin's posthumous career, and to develop a better understanding of the way literature and other value-domains interact to produce 'world literary value.'
- With Gianna Zocco and Remo Verdickt, I am co-editing a special issue of the James Baldwin Review on European Baldwins. The special issue begins to trace the footprint of Baldwin's life and work in different European linguistic and national contexts.
- Tom Toremans and I also co-direct a project entitled 'Righting the Black Atlantic,' which reassesses the notion of the Black Atlantic as a key term for capturing transnational mobility for our current age of involuntary displacement and human rights violations. The project investigates an understudied corpus of twentieth-century expatriate African American writing that is marked by the imprint of encounters with international law. Dr. Rich Cole is the main researcher employed in the project.
- With Ali Sperling and David Lombard, I am co-editing a special issue of Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment on the topic of Anthropocene Sublimes. The special issue draws on revisionary theories of, among others, the toxic sublime, the haptic sublime, and the petroleum sublime to test the viability of the notion of the sublime for framing and representation environmental crisis.
- With colleagues from Sweden and Hungary, I am co-organizing a conference entitled 'What Remains? Literature and Ethics in a Time of Crisis.' The conference starts from the observation that, while it has been a quarter century since the juncture of literature and ethics was a central topic of debate (pitching proponents of literature’s role as an empathy engine against theorists who valorized literature as a site of singular otherness), recent social and environmental developments urge an explicit return to the question of literary ethics. The conference will be the basis of an edited volume that updates the late-twentieth-century debate for the present.