| Caren Irr
Associate Professor Ph.D., Duke University Rabb 142 office hours: irr @ brandeis.edu 781-736-2143 |
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Research Interests
American Literature and Culture since 1900, Theory, Media Studies.
Selected Publications
On Jameson: From Postmodernsim to Globalization, co-editor, State University of New York Press, 2005
Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique, co-editor, State University of New York Press, 2002
The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
"The Americanization of Yoga?: Understanding Intellectual Property in the Context of Global Capitalism" in "Americanization and Globalization," a special issue of Genre 38 (Fall 2005): 281-307.
"EMPIRE and the Commons," the electronic book review (posted December 2005). www.electronicbookreview.com
"World Heritage Sites and the Concept of the Commons," forthcoming in publications of Globalization and Autonomy working group, McMaster University (UBC Press: 2007/2008).
Articles and reviews in Profession, Genre, The Novel and the American Left (Iowa 2004), altx.com, American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Literature, Essays on Canadian Writing, Moderism/Modernity, Polygraph, Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization (M.E. Sharpe 2003), World Bank Literature (Minnesota 2002), Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Essays (New Mexico 1999), and other journals and collections.
Current Projects
"Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright"--a book manuscript that asks how the expansion of the Anglo-American copyright regime has influenced contemporary writing. In the introduction, I trace problems that women writers, in particular, have faced since the 18th century (when they were often unable to claim intellectual property rights as individuals), but the bulk of the manuscript examines women novelists' very recent efforts to find space in and imagine a territory beyond copyright. Some of the authors considered include Leslie Marmon Silko, Andrea Barrett, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Kathy Acker.
New book project on 21st-century post-national fiction. Among the fifty writers profiled in this project are Dave Eggers, Kiran Desai, Tony D'Souza, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Richard Powers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gary Shteyngart, Daniel Alarcon, Uzodinma Iweala, Olga Grushin, Dinaw Mengestu, and William T. Vollmann.
Several forthcoming essays on global culture and the commons.
Awards
Fulbright Lecturer, Czech Republic, 2003-2004.
Selected Courses Taught
Cyber-Theory (ENG 101b)
American Popular Music and Contemporary Fiction (ENG 177b)
American Fiction since 1945 (ENG 187a)
American Writers and World Affairs (ENG 187b)
American Literature After Television (ENG 217a)
Copyright and Contemporary American Writing (ENG 217b)
21st-Century American Literature (ENG 8a)
this page updated May 21, 2008