David R. Sherman

Associate Professor of English

Departments/Programs

Comparative Literature
English
Health: Science, Society, and Policy
Masters Comparative Literature

Degrees

New York University, Ph.D.
New York University, M.A.
University of California, Berkeley, B.A.

Expertise

Modernism, Contemporary British, Narrative Theory, Continental Philosophy, Elegy, Trauma and Witnessing, Secularization

Profile

David Sherman's literary scholarship investigates modernism as a body of thought about mortality, temporality, obligation, witnessing, collective memory, and the nature of the sacred in a secular age. His book In a Strange Room: Modernism's Corpses and Mortal Obligation, addresses literary responses to changing mortuary practices around the turn of the twentieth century. He is currently writing a book modernism's engagement with secularization, The Machine Stops: Modernism, Human Fungibility, and the Critique of Secular Hope.

Courses Taught

COML	117a	Magical Realism and Modern Myth
ENG	1a	Introduction to Literary Studies
ENG	40bj	The Birth of the Short Story
ENG	58a	Literature and Medicine
ENG	60a	Storytelling Performance
ENG	60aj	Storytelling Performance
ENG	78a	Virginia Woolf
ENG	78b	Modernism, Atheism, God
ENG	107b	Literary Witnessing and the Poetics of Memory
ENG	111aj	Narrative Theory
ENG	131a	Comedy: Literature, Film, and Theory
ENG	148a	Inventing Farewell: A Practicum on Elegy
ENG	161a	Literature and Counterculture
ENG	171a	The History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to Postmodernism
ENG	180b	Romantic Comedy / Matrimonial Tragedy
ENG	200a	Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
ENG	238b	Against Forgetting: Literature between History and Memory
ENG	257b	Modernism's Broken Worlds
ENG	350a	Proseminar
GSAS	301d	Interdisciplinary Prospectus Seminar
HUM/UWS	2a	Crime and Punishment: Justice and Criminality from Plato to Serial

Awards and Honors

James T. Arthur Dissertation Fellowship for the Study of Time, New York University (2002 - 2003)

Lind American Literature Fellowship, New York University (2001)

Molberger Fellowship, New York University (2001)

Scholarship

Sherman, David R.. "Chaplin Boxing." Modernism / modernity Print Plus Platform volume 3. cycle 4 (2019)

Sherman, David R.. "“Stransom's Secular Altar, or, James's Pragmatics of Dying”." The Henry James Review 37. 3 (2017): 207-217.

Sherman, David R.. "“Woolf’s Secular Imaginary”." Modernism / modernity 23. 4 (2017): 711-732.

Sherman, David R. "'The Being that Thinks in Us': Woolf and the Aesthetics of Self-Alarm." Le Tour Critique 2. (2014): 369-377.

Sherman, David R. In a Strange Room: Modernism's Corpses and Mortal Obligation. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Sherman, David R. "Derek Walcott's 'A Far Cry from Africa' and 'Midsummer'." The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry, 1900 to the Present. 2009.

Sherman, David R.. ""Is Narrative Fundamental?" Beckett's Levinasian Question in Malone Dies." Journal of Modern Literature 32. 4 (2009).

Sherman, David R. "Elegy under the Knife: Geoffrey Hill and the Ethics of Sacrifice." Twentieth-Century Literature 54.2. (2008).

Sherman, David R. "A Plot Unraveling into Ethics: Woolf, Levinas, and 'Time Passes.'." Woolf Studies Annual 13. (2007).

Sherman, David R. "Burial Plots, Inoperative Community, and Faulkner's As I lay Dying." Theory@Buffalo 11. (2007).

Sherman, David R. "Review: Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience, by Suzanne Nalbantian." Woolf Studies Annual vol. 12

Sherman, David R. and Fritz, Holly. "The Academic Job Crisis and the Small Schools Movement." MLA Profession (2001).