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Aaron Chandler
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443-352-4142

Aaron Chandler Ph.D.

Chair, English, History & Humanities, Associate Professor, English
English, History | School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Education

  • PhD in American Literature, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2009.
  • MA in English Literature and Creative Writing, Hollins University, 2002. Concentration in Poetry.
  • BA in English, Roanoke College, 1998.

Research

Primary literary research interests include:

  • post-1945 literature in the United States;
  • representations of poverty in literature and the social sciences;
  • African American literatures and cultures;
  • theories of emotion and affect;
  • race, ethnicity, and migration;
  • class, identity, and poverty;
  • postmodernity and postmodern theory;
  • American studies, popular culture, and consumer culture

Publications

Articles and Edited Collections:

  • “Egalitarian Longings: The Problem with Pity and the Search for Equality in William Vollmann’s Poor People.” William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion. Eds. Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes. University of Delaware Press. 2014: 25-46.
  • “Introduction: Imagination without walls,” Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imaginary. ed, Christian Moraru. New York: Columbia UP. 2010: 1-24.
  • At the Gates of Writing: Matei Calinescu and the Distance Between Rereading and Rewriting.” symploke. 17.2 (2009). 271-276
  • “Mutual Wounding Shall Have Been Won and Heal: Deleuzean Masochism and the Anxiety of Representation in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Literature Interpretation Theory. 20 (2009): 196-214
  • “An Unsettling, Alternative Self’’: Benno Levin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 50.3 (2009): 241-260

Book Reviews and Review Articles:

  • Rev. of Michael Wutz. Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology. symploke 18.1 (2011): 402-404
  • Rev. of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough. symploke. 16.2 (2009): pp. 387-389
  • “Introduction to Focus: The Affective Turn.” American Book Review. 29.6. (2008): 3-4.
  • Rev. of Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, by Brian Richardson. American Book Review. 29.1. (2007): 18.
  • Rev of The Gothic Text, by Marshall Brown. The Comparatist: Journal of the SCLA. 31. (2007): 178.
  • Rev. of Nostalgia, by Mircea Cartarescu. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 26.2 (2006): 89.

Teaching

Selected Courses:

  • ENG 401 Major Author: August Wilson
  • ENG 402 Major Work: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
  • ENG 402 Major Work: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five
  • ENG 332 Critical Approaches to Literature II
  • ENG 340 Mad Men, Masculinity, and Mid-Century American Fiction
  • ENG 381 Violence and Trauma in Contemporary American Literature
  • ENG 381 Stranger than Fiction: Reading Literary Journalism
  • ENG 240 Introduction to African American Literature
  • ENG 281 Broke U.S.A: The Literature of Poverty, Wealth, and Money
  • ENG 281 Whodunnit: Detective and Crime Fiction
  • ENG 281 Political Fictions: The Lies and Literature of American Politics
  • ENG 287 Street Poetry from Whitman to Hip-Hop

Highlights

Selected Conferences:

  • “Man is Wolf to Man: Liberal Masculinities and the Alt-Right Threat in Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill.” Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, NeMLA, Johns Hopkins University, March 2022
  • “Fables of the Gig Economy: Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire, and the Telepoetics of Entrepreneurship” Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association MAPACA Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, Nov 8, 2019
  • “Building Faculty Support for General Education Assessment: An Organic Approach.” Co-presented with Natasha Miller, Stevenson University’s Director of Assessment. Middle States Commission on Higher Education MSCHE Conference, Washington DC, Nov 28-30, 2018
  • “DAMNation?: Kendrick Lamar, Fugitivity, and Afro-Pessimism.” Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association MAPACA Conference, Baltimore, MD Nov 8-10, 2018.
  • “Does the Underclass Matter: American Poverty and the Postwar Retreat of Materialism.” American Literature Association Conference, Washington, D.C. May 2014
  • “L’états de Nature in the Heart of the City: Fellahin, Preterite, Underclass.” Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts Conference, Guilford College, NC, October 18-19 2013.
  • “Poverty and Pathos: (re)Composing Class” Conference on College Composition and Communication, Louisville, KY March 17, 2010
  • “Thrice-Told Tales: Hawthorne and September 11 in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies” South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Atlanta, GA. November 6, 2009.
  • “Little Life Sentences: Sentimentalism and its Ghost in Anna Deavere Smith’s Plays.” Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Philadelphia, PA. October 22, 2009
  • “Funhouse Mirrors: The Ends of Mimesis in Post-War American Fiction” Core Lecture Series, American Experience in the 20th Century, Ashby Residential College, Greensboro, NC, November 14, 2009.
  • “Rich Multiplicities: New Methods and Affects.” Modern Language Association Convention, San Francisco, CA. December 2, 2008.
  • “Feeling Everything Different: (Meta) Sentimentalism in Jonathan Saffron Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” Northeast Modern Language Association, Boston, MA. February 26, 2009.

Awards:

  • Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism for “Slum Simulacra” in Twentieth-Century Literature: 2022
  • Rose Dawson Award for Professor of the Year: 2021-2022
  • National Society of Leadership and Success’s Impact Leader Award: 2022
  • Faculty Fellow, Center for Teaching and Learning 2019-2021

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