Department of English

John Plotz

Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities
Co-Founder, Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative
(education in the criminal justice system)
PhD, Harvard University
Editor, "B-Sides" (Public Books)

Co-Host, Recall This Book  podcast (episodes on minimalism, new media, addiction, Circe, etc.)

Meet Professor Plotz through OpenBook: An English Department Podcast.

Research Interests

Victorian literature, the novel, science fiction and fantasy.

Awards

• Eberhard L. Faber Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English at Princeton University, 2022-23
• Nahum Glatzer Teaching Scholar Award, 2021-22
• Fellowship, Newhouse Center for the Humanities, 2018—2019

• Guggenheim Fellowship, 2011-12

• Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2011-12

• Brandeis University Dean of Arts and Sciences Mentoring Award, 2006-07

• Howard Foundation Fellowship for 2005-06

Selected Publications

Books

• Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming, 2023.
• B-Side Books: Essays on Forgotten Favorites. Columbia University Press, 2021.

• Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton University Press, 2017.

• Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton University Press, 2008.

• The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Books and Articles (for a General Readership)

• Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure. Illustrated by Phyllis Sarofff. Children's Book. (Bunker Hill Publishing, June, 2014). Reviews in Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Publishers Weekly, etc.
• “Many into One, One into Many: George Lamming (1927-2022).” Public Books (July 15, 2022). Reprinted in 3 Quarks Daily.
• “Beverly Cleary Forever (1916-2021).” Public Books (April 12, 2021).
• "Buster Keaton Falls Up." Public Books (November 13, 2020).

• "In Memoriam: Agnes Heller." Public Books (September 5, 2019).
• B-Side: Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution.  Public Books (March 6, 2019).
• “In Memoriam: Philip Roth.” Public Books (May 28, 2018).
• "In Memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin." Public Books (January 29, 2018).

• "John Williams's Perfect Anti-Western." Public Books (May 1, 2016).

• "Nixon's Nemesis: Ursula Le Guin's Anarchist Aesthetics." Public Books (October 15, 2015).

• "The Story's Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula Le Guin." Public Books (June 15, 2015).

• "Necessary Pleasures: How I Learned to Write, and Why." In "Writing for the Curious: Why Study Writing." Ed. Kishor Vaidya. (Curious Academic Publishing, 2015).

• "Jean Stafford, Antisocialite." Public Books (January 6, 2014).

• "Zounds, Milady: At the Renaissance Faire." Slate (February 2, 2013).

• "Feeling like a Stoic: Doris Lessing's Experimental Fiction." Public Books (August 7, 2012).

• "Ray Bradbury's Death." Slate. June 6, 2012.

• "What Do Where the Wild Things Are and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address Have in Common?" Slate. May 8, 2012.

• "Their Noonday Demons, and Ours." The New York Times Book Review. Back-page Essay. December 25, 2011.

• "This Book is 119 Years Overdue." Slate. November 17, 2011.

• Brandeis Special Collections Spotlight, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and the Kelmscott Press, November 2010

Academic Talks Available Online

• “Critical Conversation” (with neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano). March, 2020.
• “Literature of the Planetary Future.” (with Wai Chee Dimock and Colin Milburn). CSN, Stanford, May, 2019.
• “On Distraction.” Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University (Symposium on Semi-Detached and other topics, with Marina Van Zuylen). November, 2018.
• “Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth/Acedia.” Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs. May 2018. Halifax, Nova Scotia. Invited. (Related Canadian Broadcast Corporation podcast)

• "Emotional Intelligence, Darwin-style: on the Victorian origins of the idea of the Anthropocene." Plenary Talk. "Affective Habitus." Canberra, June 2014.

Refereed Articles and Book Chapters

• "Operating at a Loss: Nominal Values and Mechanical Models." Victorian Studies, vol. 62 no. 2, 2020, p. 268-272.
• “Windy, Tangible, Resonant Worlds: The Non-Human Fantasy of William Morris” in Companion to William Morris. Edited by Florence Boos (Routledge, October 2020).  
• “Time Travelling with William Morris.” In Teaching William Morris, ed. Jason Martinek and Elizabeth Miller. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 41-48.
• "Having it Both Ways with Erving Goffman." Victorian Literature and Culture 47. 2 (2019), 1-10.
• “Portability Now: Between Thing Theory and Object Oriented Ontology” in Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday. Edited by Niklas Fischer et al. (Lexington, 2018), 163-174. 
• “Science Fiction” [Keyword]. Victorian Literature and Culture 46:3/4 (2018) 854-858.
• “Is Realism Failing? The Rise of Secondary Worlds.” Novel 50:3 (2017), 426-436.
• “How to Do Things with Things.” Arcade Colloquy: Thing Theory in Literary Studies. November 12, 2017.

• "Overtones and Empty Rooms: Willa Cather's Semi-Detached Modernism." Novel 50:1 (2017), 56-76.

• "Partial to Opera: Sounding Willa Cather's Empty Rooms" in "Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film." Edited by Julian Murphet, Helen Groth and Penelope Hone (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 94-108.

• "Victorian Short Stories." Chapter 7, "Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story." Edited Ann-Marie Einhaus. (Cambridge University Press: 2016), 87-100.
• "Materiality in Theory: What to Make of Victorian Things, Objects, and Commodities." In "The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture." Edited by Juliet John (2016) 522-538.

• "Speculative Naturalism and the Problem of Scale: Richard Jefferies's After London, After Darwin." MLQ 76.1 (2015), 31-56.

• "The Provincial Novel." "A Companion to the English Novel," ed. Stephen Arata, J. Paul Hunter, Jennifer Wicke (Blackwell: 2015), 360-372.

• "The Victorian Anthropocene: George Marsh and the Tangled Bank of Darwinian Environmentalism." Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (vol. 4, 2014), 52-64.

• "Serial Pleasures: The Influence of Television on the Victorian Novel." RAVoN 63; Special Issue, "Television for Victorianists" (2014).

• "Henry James's Rat-tat-tat-ah: Insidious Loss, Disguised Recovery and Semi-Detached Subjects." Henry James Review 34 (2013): 232-244.
• "Two Flowers: George Eliot's Diagrams and the Modern Novel." "A Companion to George Eliot." Ed. Amanda Anderson and Harry Shaw (Blackwell, 2013) 76-90.

• "'On the Spot': Willa Cather's Remarkable Quotation Marks." Willa Cather Newsletter and Review. 56:2 (Spring 2013), 20-21.

• "The Short Fiction of James Hogg." 113-121 in "The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg." Edited Douglas Mack and Ian Duncan (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

• "No Future? The Novel's Pasts." Novel 44:1 (2011), 23-6.

• "The Semi-Detached Provincial Novel." Victorian Studies, 53:3 (2011), 405-16.

• "Reading as a Resonant Cavity: John Stuart Mill's Mediated Involvement" 69-92 in 
"The Feeling of Reading." Ed. Rachel Ablow (U. Michigan Press 2010).

• "The Whole Hogg." Review Essay. "Collected Works of James Hogg." Novel 43:2 (2010), 120-5.

• "Antisocial Fictions: Mill and the Novel." Novel 43:1 (2010) 38-46.

• "The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability in Victorian Greater Britain." Victorian Studies, Summer 2007, Vol. 49 Issue 4, p 659-684.

• "Discreet Jewels: Victorian Diamond Narratives and the Problem of Sentimental Value." In "The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, And It-narratives in Eighteenth-Century England." Edited by Mark Blackwell. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007, 329-354.

• "Nowhere and Everywhere: The End of Portability in William Morris's Romances." ELH 74:2 (2007), 931- 956.

• "The Return of the Blob: Or How Sociology Decided to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd." 203-224 in "Crowds," edited by Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

• "Chartist Literature." In Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Ed. David Kastan. Oxford University Press, 2006, I, 440-444.

• "Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory." Criticism (2005) 47:1, 109-118

• "One-Way Traffic: George Lamming and the Portable Empire." In "After the Imperial Turn." Edited by Antoinette Burton (Duke University Press, 2003).

• "Virtually Being There: Edmund Wilson's Suburbs." Southwest Review 87:1 (2002), 10-28. (winner, 2002 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction in Southwest Review)

• "Crowd Power: Chartism, Carlyle and the Victorian Public Sphere." Representations 70 (2000), 87-114.

• "Out of Circulation: For and Against Book Collecting." Southwest Review 84:4 (Fall, 1999), 462-478. (named "Notable Essay," Best American Essays, 2000).

• "Objects of Abjection: The Systematic and the Anti-Systematic in the Novels of Jean Genet." Twentieth Century Literature 44:1 (Spring 1998), 100-118.

• "Motion Slickness: Spectacle and Circulation in Thomas Hardy's 'On the Western Circuit." Studies in Short Fiction. 33:4 (1996), 369-386.

• "Coriolanus and the Failure of Performatives." ELH 63:4 (1996), 709-732.

Edited Collection

• "Pairing Empires: A Special Issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History" 2:1 (Spring, 2001). Selected papers from the "Pairing Empires" conference. Guest-Edited and with an introduction, "Pairing Empires," by Paul Kramer and John Plotz.

Selected Reviews

• "Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture." Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. "Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading." Isabel Hofmeyr. Nineteenth Century Literature 68:2 (Sept. 2013), 270-77.

• "Guru English," Srinivas Aravamudan. Modern Philology, 104:2 (November 2006), 285-290.

• "Practicing New Historicism." Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt. MLQ 62:3 (Fall, 2001), 285-290.

• "'Victorian Relativity' by Christopher Herbert: A Review Essay." Novel 36:1 (2002) 111-118.

Current Projects

• “Nonhuman Being: Post-Darwinian Naturalism, Fantasy, and Science Fiction” attempts to trace the legacy of Darwinian natural materialism in the near-simultaneous emergence of prose fantasy, science fiction and Naturalist literature. In the late 19th century, evolutionary theory and the emergent “epistemic virtue” of objectivity shape not only the deterministic logic of Naturalism, but also the otherworldly permutations of fantasy and science fiction, which register a scalar shift in humanity’s relationship to a more expansive space and time—and to human interior accessible in a range of new ways. All three genres explore the nonhuman within human existence, making them bellwethers of changing human relations to the object as well as the animal world. A vernacular thing theory unfolded in the decades after Darwin—and in many ways persists into the present-day, subtly shaping various forms of “posthumanism” and “object-oriented ontology.” Studying the rise of fantasy, science fiction and naturalism together--a novel approach, building on excellent recent scholarship about each separate genre—clarifies not only that thing theory’s origins but also its contemporary afterlife.

Selected Courses Taught

• ENG 240a Genre, Form, Mode: Problems of Aesthetic Classification

• ENG 176b Jane Austen and George Eliot: Novel Genius

• ENG 150b Out of This World: Science Fiction's Cyborgs, Time Travellers, and Space Invaders - Interact with student projects from the spring 2022 class.

• ENG 18a Irish Literature, from the Peasantry to the Pogues

• ENG 38a Fantasy Worlds: From Lilliput and Middle Earth to LARPs

• ENG 70a The Birth of the Movies: From Silent Film to Hollywood

• ENG 75b The Victorian Novel: Secrets, Lies, and Monsters

• Birth of the Short Story (ENG 40b) - Read some of the incredible work produced by undergraduate students in Birth of the Short Story. (And more here)