Faculty Guide

Title

Professor of English

English
Environmental Studies
Film, Television and Interactive Media

Expertise

Contemporary literature. Film and media studies. Global studies. Environmental Studies. Social/political theory.

Profile

Professor Irr teaches courses on literature (mainly US), film and culture since 1900. She is currently working on two projects: one on the kinds of stories people like to tell about orphans and the other on contemporary fiction devoted to environmental problems.

Awards and Honors

Fulbright Lectureship in Czech Republic (2003)

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Fellowship (1999)

Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholarship (1994 - 1995)

Canadian Embassy Canadian Studies Graduate Student Fellowship (1993)

Courses Taught

ENG	8a	Twenty-First-Century American Literature
ENG	11b	Fiction: A Basic Course
ENG	17a	Alternative and Underground Journalism
ENG	28a	Nature Writing
ENG	30b	New American Cinema of the 1960s and 70s
ENG	50b	American Independent Film
ENG	60a	Documentary Prose and Film
ENG	60b	The Films of Disney
ENG	177b	The Rock and Roll Novel
ENG	187a	American Fiction since 1945
ENG	187b	American Writers and World Affairs
ENG	200a	Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
ENG	217a	Writing Twentieth-Century Revolutions
ENG	237b	The Worlds of Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Scholarship

Irr, Caren. "Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Realism in William T. Vollmann's Poor People." Capitalist Realism. Ed. Alison Shonkwiler. University of Iowa Press, 2014 (forthcoming)

Irr, Caren. "Postmodernism in Reverse: American National Allegories and the 21st-Century Political Novel." Twentieth Century Literature 57. 3-4 (2012): 516-546.

Irr, Caren. "Review of Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890-2011." by John Marx. The Review of English Studies 2012

Irr, Caren. "Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in 21st-Century Expatriate Fiction." American Literary History 23. 3 (2011): 660-679.

Irr, Caren. ""Media and Migration: Danticat, Díaz, Eugenides, and Scibona." Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern. Ed. Jessica Datema and Diane Krumrey. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010

Irr, Caren. Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2010.

Irr, Caren. ""A Challenge for Post-National American Studies"." American Literary History 20. 3 (2008): 601-608.

Irr, Caren. ""World Heritage Sites and the Concept of the Commons,"." Global Ordering: Institutions and Autonomy in a Changing World. Ed. Louis Pauly and Will Coleman. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. 85-105.

Irr, Caren. "Review." Rev. of Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, by Eds. Wai-chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell. Comparative Literature Studies vol. 45 2008: 518-521.

Irr, Caren, Ian Buchanan. On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization. SUNY, 2005.

Irr, Caren, John Protevi. "Fredric Jameson." Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy. 2005.

Irr, Caren, John Protevi. "Immanent Critique." Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy. 2005.

Irr, Caren. "Review." Rev. of Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism, by Madhu Dubey. New Formations vol. 55 195-199.

Irr, Caren. "The Americanization of Yoga?: Understanding Intellectual Property in the Context of Global Capitalism." Genre 38. (2005): 281-307.

Irr, Caren. "Beyond Appropriation: Pussy, King of the Pirates and a Feminist Critique of Intellectual Property." Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker. Ed. Maria Gonzalez and Michael Hardin. San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 2004. 211-234.

Irr, Caren. "Going to the Library in the Czech Republic." Profession (2004): 74-82.

Irr, Caren. "The Properties of Nature in Josephine Herbst's Trexler Trilogy." The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction. Ed. Janet Galligani Casey. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. 81-95.

Irr, Caren. "Who Owns Our Culture?: Intellectual Property, Human Rights and Globalization." Refounding Human Rights in an Age of Globalization. Ed. Andrew Nathan, Kavita Philip, Neal Engelhart, and Mahmoud Monshipoori. London: M.E. Sharpe, 2003. 3-33.

Irr, Caren, co-ed with Jeffrey T. Nealon. Co-ed., Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique. SUNY Press, 2002.

Irr, Caren. "All Published Literature is World Bank Literature, or The Zapatistas' Storybook." World Bank Literature. Ed. Amitava Kumar. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 237-252.

Irr, Caren. "Literature as Proleptic Globalization, or a Prehistory of the New Intellectual Property." South Atlantic Quarterly Spring 2002. (2002): 773-802.

Irr, Caren. "Review." Rev. of A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker's Poetry and Fiction, by Rhonda S. Pettit. American Literature December 2001: 880-881.

Irr, Caren. "The Postmodern Goes Global." Rev. of The Ends of Globalization; Negotiating Postmodernism;Questions of Modernity, by Mohammed A. Bamyeh; Wayne Gabardi; Timothy Mitchell. Southern Review vol. 34 102-106.

Irr, Caren. "Review." Rev. of Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, by Werner Sollors. Comparative Literature Studies 364-370.

Irr, Caren. "Review." Rev. of The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law: The British Experience, 1740-1911, by Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently. Business History Review Summer 2000: 352-355.

Irr, Caren. "Review." Rev. of The New Red Negro, by James Edward Smethurst. American Literature September 2000: 645-646.

Irr, Caren. "Curious George at the Border: American Intellectual Property and Canadian Culture." Essays on Canadian Writing Summer 1999. (1999).

Irr, Caren. "The Timeliness of Almanac of the Dead, or A Postmodern Rewriting of Radical Fiction." Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. 223-244.

Irr, Caren. The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s. Duke University Press, 1998.

Irr, Caren. "From Nation to Generation: The Economics of North American Culture, 1930s/1990s." Canadian Review of American Studies 27. (1997): 135-144.

Irr, Caren. "Queer Borders: Figures from the 1930s for US-Canadian Relations." American Quarterly 49. 3 (1997): 504-530..

Irr, Caren. "The Politics of Spatial Phobias in Native Son." Critical Essays on Richard Wright's Native Son. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Twayne, 1997. 196-212.

Irr, Caren. "Between the Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Experimental Prose in U.S. and Canadian Leftist Periodicals of the 1930s." Journal of Canadian Studies 30. 2 (1995): 19-38.

Irr, Caren. "Political Surveillance: Notes on Reading an FBI File." Found Object (1994): 91-112.