About
I am currently an Associate Professor of
English at Portland State University, where I research and teach classes in 20th-century Anglophone modernism, film and media studies, and critical theory. After receiving my Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, I served as an academic adviser, as an ACLS Fellow at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi.
My first book,
Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer, explores the relationships among modernist literature, music, noise, and aural culture. I have published in
Textual Practice,
James Joyce Quarterly,
Modern Drama,
Studies in the Novel,
Victorian Literature and Culture, and
The New Ezra Pound Studies (CUP, ed. Mark Byron). I present regularly at the Modernist Studies Association conference.
I am currently at work on a new project about the documentary filmmaker and amateur anthropologist Humphrey Jennings, focusing on how Jennings’s filmic, literary, and anthropological work addresses the media ecology and material culture of post-WWII Britain, producing newly textured ways of reading and narrating citizenship.
At PSU I teach a range of classes, including undergraduate and graduate modernism courses; general education courses on modern British lit, race and melodrama, film history, and critical film theory; major authors courses on James, Conrad, and Joyce; and advanced topics courses on aesthetic and cultural theories of failure. Further information and selected syllabuses (yes, “syllabuses”) can be found on my personal webpage,
http://joshepstein.net .