Background and experience
I am Professor of American Literature and Culture, and I work in the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation. I received my Ph.D. in English from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. My dissertation was on the figure of 'race and nation' in the gothic fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.
Teaching
At the BA level I teach in a survey course on U.S. and British literature. I have also taught courses on African American literature, the contemporary British novel, and U.S. and British culture and history. At the MA level I teach courses on science fiction, fantasy, U.S. migrant literature, the historical novel, and literary theory.
Research
I am a big fan of genre literature, and much of my scholarship in recent years has been devoted to science fiction. This scholarship tends to have a strong historical orientation, incorporating various continental theoretical inputs. I am keenly interested in connections between literature and science, technologization and embodiment, and the global horizons of genre- and literary studies.
My latest published science fiction essays have dealt with Liu Cixin, Arthur C. Clark, and the thematic of what I call ‘global repositioning,’ concerning China’s rise as a regional and global power and its impact on sf; fictions about interstellar communication, the Cold War and conditions of mid-20th century globalism in Stanislaw Lem and Arthur C. Clarke; and both the Kantianism and the ‘thwarted’ interwar-period cosmopolitanism of Olaf Stapledon in his fiction.
Another compelling interest of mine is the philosophy of plasticity, especially as articulated by Catherine Malabou. As an increasingly influential concept with philosophical roots going back to Kant and Hegel, plasticity coordinates with and updates in important ways a host of other modern critical and theoretical concepts, such as subjectivity, event, history, and technicity. I have written about plasticity in connection with literary studies (focusing on the Canadian poet Anne Carson), philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and neuroscience, the plastics industry, and the rise of deep learning in computer engineering (forthcoming).