Research interests:Twentieth century literature; critical theory and cultural studies; film, television, and media studies; historicism; 19th century American literature; Akira Kurosawa and Japanese cinema

Joel Burges is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. Burges's current research interests include twentieth-century literature, critical theory and cultural studies, and film and media studies, though he has spent a great deal of scholarly time on the American nineteenth century, race and sexuality in Caribbean literature and postcolonial theory, and "body genres"--comedy, melodrama, horror--in U.S. film history as well.

He is working on two books. The first, entitled The Uses of Obsolescence, argues that contemporary literature and media turns to the outmoded in order to figure historical change and spark historical thinking; this book touches on a wide range of writers, studios, and filmmakers, including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Nicola Barker, William Gibson, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nicholson Baker, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Pixar, Hayao Miyazaki, and Douglas Sirk. It ultimately seeks to upset dominant views about history and time in contemporary criticism. The second book, entitled Fiction after TV, aims to understand what happens to the category and practice of fiction in both literary and televisual fields after the rise of television in the second half of the twentieth century.

In addition to a piece of Akira Kurosawa, he is also working on two essays about fiction, historicism, and the novel--one considers how novels periodize fictionally by taking up the cases of A.S. Byatt and Joyce Carol Oates; the other looks at 9/11 as a narrative event in a cluster of novels published in the early 2000's.