Caren Irr

Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities

Departments/Programs

Comparative Humanities
English
Environmental Studies
Film, Television and Interactive Media
History of Ideas

Degrees

Duke University, Ph.D.
Duke University, M.A.
Swarthmore College, B.A.

Expertise

Theory. Film and media studies. Contemporaneity. The novel.

Profile

Professor Irr teaches courses on theory, film, media, and fiction since 1900. She is currently writing on environmental aesthetics and philosophy. Webpage

Courses Taught

COML/ENG	70b	Environmental Film, Environmental Justice
COML/ENG	191a	Environmental Aesthetics
ENG	17a	Alternative and Underground Journalism
ENG	28a	Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction
ENG	30b	American Film Auteurs of the 1970s
ENG	180a	The Modern American Short Story
ENG	188b	Capitalism and Culture
ENG	200a	Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies
ENG	251b	Political Fictions
HUM/UWS	5a	Nobel Laureates in Literature

Awards and Honors

Fulbright Lectureship in Czech Republic (2003 - 2004)

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Fellowship (1999)

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

Canadian Embassy Canadian Studies Graduate Student Fellowship (1993)

Scholarship

Irr, Caren, ed. Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity. 2021 ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. (forthcoming)

Irr, Caren, ed. Minima Moralia in the 21st Century: Fascism, Work, and Ecology. 2022 ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. (forthcoming)

Irr, Caren. "The Geopolitical Imaginary of the Mediterranean Noir." Globalization and Literary Studies. Ed. Joel Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021 (forthcoming)

Irr, Caren. "Ideology Critique 2.0." South Atlantic Quarterly (2020): 715-724.

Irr, Caren. "American Insecurities." Rev. of The Poetics of Insecurity, by Johannes Voelz. Novel vol. 52 2019: 466-470.

Irr, Caren. "Beyond Precarity: Human Trafficking in Contemporary American Crime Fiction." Neoliberalism and American Literature. Ed. Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2019. 168-186.

Irr, Caren. "Contemporary Ecocriticism and the Weather." Contemporary Literature 59. 2 (2019): 261-273.

Irr, Caren. "Ecostoicism, or Notes on Franzen." post45 (2018): <http://post45.research.yale.edu/2018/05/ecostoicism-or-notes-on-franzen/>.

Irr, Caren. "Remembering the 1930s in Contemporary American Historical Fiction." The Cambridge Companion to the 1930s. Ed. Bill Solomon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018

Irr, Caren. "Where in the World is US Literature?." American Literary History 30. 2 (2018): 379-393.

Irr, Caren. "An Althusser for the 21st Century (introduction to guest edited special issue)." Mediations 30. 2 (2017): 29-36.

Irr, Caren. "Global Fiction and the Postmodern American Novel." Cambridge Companion to the Postmodern American Novel. Ed. Paula Geyh. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 47-62.

Irr, Caren. "Introduction to Climate Fiction in English." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Ed. Paula Rabinowitz. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-4.

Irr, Caren. "Neoliberal Childhoods: The Orphan as Entrepreneur in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction." Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literature. Ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith and Mitchum Huehls. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 220-236.

Irr, Caren. "The Resurgence of the Political Novel." Postmodern/Postwar--and After. Ed. Daniel Worden and Jason Gladstone. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 217-226.

Irr, Caren. "Neomedievalism in the Contemporary City Novel: Tobar, Adichie, Lee." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 42. 4 (2015): 421-436.

Irr, Caren. "The Space of Genre in the New Green Novel." Studia Neophilologica (2015): 1-15.

Irr, Caren. "Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Realism in William T. Vollmann's Poor People." Reading Capitalist Realism. Ed. Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge. University of Iowa Press, 2014. 177-194.

Irr, Caren. "Literature and Adoption: Themes, Theses, Questions." American Literary History 26. 1 (2014): 1-11.

Irr, Caren. Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the 21st Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

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

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

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. "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 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.