ANNA KORNBLUH
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
Professor, English, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2020 to present
Associate Professor, English, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2014 to present
Assistant Professor, English, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2008 to present
Visiting Assistant Professor, English, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2007-2008
ACADEMIC ADMINISTRATION
Director of Graduate Studies, UIC, August 2021 to present
Associate Head, Department of English, UIC, January 2016 to August 2020
DEGREES
Ph.D. English, University of California, Irvine, July 2007
M.A. English, University of California, Irvine, June 2004
M.A. Film Studies and Critical Pedagogy, UCLA, June 2001
B.A. Political Science, cum laude Macalester College, June 1999
PUBLICATIONS
Books
In Print
Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024)
The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press, Fall 2019)
Marxism: Fight Club (Bloomsbury Film Theory in Practice series, May 2019)
Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Realist Form (Fordham University Press, 2014)
Articles
Forthcoming
“Falling Heists, Rising Grift: Filming Capital in the Already Long 21st Century” SAQ
“Totality Desires: psychoanalytic dialectics in Jameson and Kiesling” in The Future of Totality Duke UP
“A Very Special Relationship: Capitalism and the Novel Form” Cultural Critique
“The Realist Novel: A Timeline” Cambridge Companion to the Novel
In Print
“Black Scholes Model” Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary MIT Press, Dec 2024
“Us Too: Ecocide and Metalepsis in Susan Choi’s Crisis Narrative” Polygraph Spring 2024
“We Didn’t Start The Fire: Death Drive and Ecocide” Parapraxis Magazine Issue 3
“In The Air Tonight: Mediating Infrastructure with Miami Vice“ Symploke Dec 2023
“Solidarity Words” Differences Autumn 2022
“Imaginary” Portable Gray Autumn 2022
“Prospective Criticism: On Private and Public Things” Textual Practice Autumn 2021
“In Defense of Feminist Abstraction” Diacritics Winter 2021, V 49 n 2
“Ecocide and Objectivity: literary thinking in How the Dead Dream” in The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century May 2021
“Mediation Metabolized” in Raymond Williams at 100 April 2021
“Extinct Critique” SAQ Fall 2020
“Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise” Mediations Fall 2019
“Objectively Curious Commitments” Victorian Literature and Culture, Summer 2020
“Theory Presents” Criticism Fall 2019
“Freeing Impersonality: the objective subject in Psychoanalysis and Sense & Sensibility” ( in Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Routledge, Fall 2019)
“The State of Contradiction” Continental Thought and Theory Fall 2019
“Totality” Victorian Literature and Culture, Winter 2019
“The German Ideology” Bloomsbury Companion To Marx, Fall 2018
“Freud’s Return to Lacan” After Lacan, Cambridge University Press, Fall 2018
“We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel-As-Critique” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50.3
“Realism’s Empire” (review essay) Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50.1
“Present Tense Futures of the Past” Victorian Studies 59.1, Autumn 2016
“Reading the Real” (SIC 10: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Literature But Were Afraid to Ask Zizek, Duke UP) January 2017
Presentism, Form, and the Future of History b2o: boundary2 online V21 Special Issue, Autumn 2016
“History Repeating” b2o: boundary2 online V21 Special Issue, Autumn 2016
States of Psychoanalysis: Formalization and the Space of the Political Theory & Event, July 2016
“The Realist Blueprint” Henry James Review 36.3, Fall 2015
“Obscure Forms: The Letter, The Law, and The Line in Hardy’s Social Geometry” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 48.1
“The Matter of Fictitious Capital” Romantic Circles, Winter 2015
“Thomas Hardy’s ‘End of Prose’” Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth- Century History, 2014
“‘One of the Most Obscure Regions of Psychoanalysis’: Defamiliarizing Psychic Economy” A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, eds L. Marcus and A. Mukherjee, Oxford, 2014
“On Marx’s Victorian Novel” Mediations, 25.1, Winter 2011, 15-38.
“The Economic Problem of Sympathy: Parabasis, Interest and Realist Form in Middlemarch” ELH: English Literary History, 77.4, 2010, 941-967.
“Making It: Reading Boogie Nights and Blow as Symbolic Economies of Surplus and Sentiment” Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, ed. Mike Wayne, Pluto Press, 2005
“Romancing the Capital: Choice, Love, and Contradiction in The Family Man and Memento” Lacan and Contemporary Film, eds. Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, The Other Press, 2004
“For the Love of Money” Historical Materialism, 10.4, 2003
Response Essays and Reviews
“Imagined Communities 2.0” Rethinking Marxism Spring 2022
It’s Complicated nonsite, April 2021
Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2020
“The End of History – for real” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 2019
“Fifty Billion Shades of Gray” LA Review of Books, August 2018
Symposium Introduction: Speculative Formalism Syndicate, Feb 2018
The Murder of Theory Public Books, Aug 2017
“Forms” Nineteenth Century Contexts 39.1
“Chicago Law” Public Books, June 2016
Novel Theory, Century Old: Editor’s Note to Mediations Lukacs 2016 special issue
“Road To Nowhere: On Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s Cartographies of the Absolute” LA Review of Books, August 2015
“On Being Adequate to Our Own Fictions: Todd McGowan’s The Fictional Christopher Nolan” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2014
“Economic Woman” Textual Practice 2014
“Enjoying Law: Psychoanalysis and Sovereign Bodies” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Summer 2012, 17-21.
“The Novel as Event” Victorian Studies, 54.1, Autumn 2011, 176-178.
SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUES GUEST EDITED
“Theories of the Nineteenth Century” Criticism (with Zach Samalin, Fall 2019)
“Speculative Formalism” review forum at Syndicate
“V21 Collective Special Issue” b2o: boundary2online
“Lukacs 2016: Theory of the Novel at 100” Mediations
INVITED AND KEYNOTE LECTURES (SELECTED)
Climate Counteraesthetics Colorado College, Dec 2024
Middling Mediations for a Blazing World, Montclair State University, Nov 2024
Oneonta Literary Festival, October 2024
Climate Counteraesthetics at the Mid, Texas Tech, October 2024
Immediacy: a symposium, Harvard University Mahindra Center, September 2024
Middling Mediations in An Age of Immediacy, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, September 2024
Climate Counteraesthetics, UC Berkeley, September 2024
Immediacy: a book panel, UC Berkeley, September 2024
Knox College Honors Lecture, May 2024
NVSA Keynote “Creative Labor’s 19th Century Terminus,” Holy Cross, April 2024
The Louisville Conference Keynote, U of Louisville, February 2024
“Desire/Capital” Erasmus University, December 2023
“The University Environment in End Times” Grand Valley State U, November 2023
Capitalism, Climate, and Cultural Study keynote University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, September 2023
“Literary Disintermediation: Writing and the Circulation Economy” University of Iowa, September 2023
“Formalism Today”, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels June 2023
“Immediacy: Cultural Style At The End of the World”, UC Davis May 2023
“Driving Ecocide” LACK opening plenary, U Vermont, April 2023
Culler Theory Lecture, Cornell U. March 2023
“Collapsing Autonomy: Antifictionality and Antitheory as Contemporary Style” Autonomy Boston U. Nov 2022
“Immediacy as Cultural Style” Providence College Oct 2022
“Saturation: Stream Style” Northwestern U Screen Cultures Backward Glances conference Keynote Sept 2022
“Immediacy: Some Theses on Style Lately” Carnegie Mellon Sept 2022
“Immediacy as Cultural Style” Penn State Sept 2022
“Deluge, Flow, Stream: Immediacy as Video Style” Stanford, May 2022
“Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism” University of Minnesota, May 2022
“Currents of Antifictionality” Vanderbilt, April 2022
“Antifictionality: Immediacy as Literary Style” UNC, March 2022
“Antitheory” Boston College, Feb 2022
“Cultures of Collectivity” MMLA Keynote, November 2021
“Immediacy: A Vulgar Explanation for a Vulgar Mode” Drew University, April 2021
“In Defense of Feminist Abstraction” USC Women in Theory Symposium, March 2021
“The Literary Commons: Impersonality and the Novel, Then and Now” Northwestern University, February 2020
“After Fiction: Climate Realism” University of Chicago, November 2019
“Extinct Critique” Brown University, October 2019
“Necessary Cathedrals” Harvard University, September 2019
“No Present, No Future” University of Chicago, April 2019
“The Order of Forms” Yale University, Feb 2019
“Political Infrastructures” Yale University Feb 2019
“The New Public Criticism” School of Art and Art History, UIC, November 2018
“The Working Day” Princeton University, November 2018
“Realism Redux: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Symbolic Logic of Social Space” University of Pennsylvania, April 2018
“The Social Arts of Building” Hobart & William Smith Colleges, April 2018
“Photography, Formalism, Social Space” Illinois State University, March 2018
“Realism Redux: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Symbolic Logic of Social Space” University of Notre Dame, January 2018
GALLERY AND STUDIO TALKS; ART PRESS
“Immediacy: Some Theses on Contemporary Style” Goldsmiths MFAs Nov 2024
“Has Culture Become Pure Vibe?” SPIKE Art Magazine Fall 2024
TANK Magazine spring 2024 issue: 300 pages of features, fashion, art, and interviews all engaging Immediacy
“Arts of Psychoanalysis” Gray Center Feb 2023
“To Understand The Group So As To Act”: new work by Diane Severin Nguyen Renaissance Society June 2022
INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS, AND YOUTUBE APPEARANCES
The Society of Pure Vibe Aufhebung Bunga Dec 2024
Left Reckoning: The Work of Fredric Jameson Oct 2024
The American Vandal (Always Historicize) Oct 2024
ArtNet podcast The Art Angle with Ben Davis 15 Aug
Life in Pixels with Ranjodh Dhaliwal 12 Apr
Novara Media with Richard Hames 21 Mar
New Books Network with David Maruzzella 17 Mar
Hotel Bar Sessions podcast with Leigh Johnson, Rick Lee, and Jason Read 15 Mar
Todd McGowan conversation 9 Mar
Jacobin interview with Daniel Zamora 8 Mar
The Nation interview with Lily Meyer 4 Mar
Behind the News KPFA with Doug Henwood Feb 2024
The American Vandal (2024 with JD Connor) Feb 2024
The American Vandal (Ponzi Austerity in the Age of Cultural Abundance) Aug 2023
Being & Event April 2023
The American Vandal (MLA 2023 edition: Working Conditions, with MLA President Chris Newfield)
The Paris Review March 2022
The American Vandal (Worldwide Climate Teach-In: The Ministry of the Future), March 2022
High Theory (Presentism) March 2022
LOL My Praxis March 2022
Book Launch: Crisis Style and Reading the Obscene Feb 2022
The American Vandal (autoeverything!) Feb 2022
Book Launch: Universal Politics Nov 2021
Raymond Williams Society Nov 2021
The American Vandal (Billions!) Oct 2021
“Abstractions also liberate” @ Money on the Left Oct 2021
In Defense of Feminist Abstraction March 2021
The American Vandal (stonks!) Feb 2021
Form, with Todd McGowan Nov 2020
Shelter and Solidarity April 2020
Media and the End of the World March 2020
Why Theory May 2019
Neoliberalism’s Demons: Interview of Adam Kotsko Jan 2019
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS (SELECTED)
“Mediation” American Comparative Literature Association, Chicago, March 2023
“Streaming Aesthetics” Society for Cinema and Media Studies Chicago-Remote, March 2022
“On Humanist Reason” MLA Toronto-Remote, January 2021
“Victorian and Modernist Collectives” MLA Toronto-Remote, January
“Live Theory in End Times” MLA, Seattle, 2020
“On Literary Abstractions: Realism Reprized” MLA, Seattle, 2020
“Freeing Impersonality: the Objective Subject in Psychoanalysis” ECRITS, Duquesne, 2019
“Austen’s Social Grammar” NASSR, UIC 2019
“Express Yourself: Mediating Impersonality in the Epoch of Human Capital,” LACK, Clark U 2019
“The Immanent Theory Syllabus” Theorizing the Theory Survey, MLA, Chicago, 2019
“Critical Building” The Persistence of Ideology Critique roundtable, MLA, Chicago, 2019
“Totality: All the Things” Society for Novel Studies, Cornell, 2018
“ASECS and V21: collectivity, collaboration, connection” ASECS, Orlando, 2018
“The Psychoanalytic Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” MLA, New York, 2018
“Presentism and Space” MLA, Strategic Presentism Roundtable, New York, 2018
PANELS, SEMINARS, AND CONFERENCES ORGANIZED (SELECTED)
“Political Futures,” UIC Institute for the Humanities, October 2018 (with Mark Canuel and Nasser Mufti)
“Novel Theory” Society for Novel Studies biannual conference, Cornell University, 2018 (Conference Co-organizer with Caroline Levine and Amanda Claybaugh)
“Debates in English Studies” Gerald Graff retirement symposium with Stanley Fish, Andrew Hoberek, Carla Kaplan, and Vershawn Young, Chicago, 2016 (Symposium Organizer)
“Lukacs’s Theory of the Novel at 100: Historicism, Realism, Critique” Presidential Session, Modern Language Association, Austin, 2016 (Panel Organizer)
“Presentism, Form, and the Future of History” V21 Collective Symposium, University of Chicago, 2015 (Conference Organizer, with Benjamin Morgan)
FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS
University of Illinois Graduate College Graduate Mentoring Award 2021
University of Illinois Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship 2020-2021
University of Illinois Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship 2009-2010
University of California Regents Dissertation Fellowship 2006-2007
Humanities Center Research Grant, UCI 2006
Dean of Humanities Summer Dissertation Fellowship, UCI 2006
Nora Folkenflik Memorial Essay Prize 2006
Michael and Stacy Koehn Endowed Critical Theory Fellowship 2005-2006
Murray Krieger Literary Theory Fellowship 2002-2007
University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium Fellowship 2001
Pi Sigma Alpha, National Political Science Honor Society 1999
COURSES TAUGHT
Aesthetic Environments (clifi beyond clifi graduate seminar)
Creative Labor (introduction to theory and criticism for new PhD students)
Thinking Big Thoughts With Literature (introduction to theory and criticism for the English major)
Practicing Literature, Practical Criticism (introduction to theory and criticism for new MA students)
Novel Theory (transhistorical Anglophone graduate seminar)
Critical Conditions: Crisis, Criticism, Critique (introduction to theory and criticism for new PhD students)
Formalism and Its Discontents (introduction to theory and criticism for new MA students)
Ideology: Aesthetics and Critique (introduction to theory and criticism for new MA students)
Sex, Society, and Other Relations that do not exist (psychoanalytic political theory graduate seminar)
Novel Worlds: Realism, Structuralism, Aesthetics (Victorian Novel graduate seminar)
Symbolic Economies: Fiction and Finance (Victorian Novel graduate seminar)
Aesthetics and Politics (theory and literature seminar for English majors, senior level, joint
with MA and PhD students)
The Critique of Everyday life (theory and literature seminar for English majors, senior level, joint with MA students)
Production and Reproduction in the Victorian Novel (literature seminar for English majors, senior level, joint with MA students)
Victoria & Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (theory and literature seminar for English majors, senior level, joint with MA students)
Victorian Structures: Structuralism and the World of the Novel (literature seminar for English
majors, senior level, joint with MA students)
The Novel and Social Space (seminar for English majors, junior level)
Sex and the City (urbanization and literature seminar for English majors, junior level)
How To Do Things With Words (lecture introduction to theory and criticism for English majors,
sophomore level)
Materialisms: British Literature 1660-1990 (lecture survey for English majors, sophomore level)
City Lit (multicentury novel survey /introduction to college literary study / intro to life in Chicago for honors freshmen)
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Editorial Board, Parapraxis, 2022 to present
Editorial Board, Genre, 2019 to present
Editorial Board, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 2016 to present
Editorial Board, Mediations: journal of the Marxist Literary Group, 2018 to present
Founder and Chair, InterCcECT (Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory), 2010 to present (please visit website for lectures, reading groups, mini-seminars organized)
Founder and Co-Facilitator, V21 Collective (Victorian studies for the 21st century), 2015 to present
(please visit website for manifesto, syllabus bank, conference streams, reading groups, publications organized)
Member, MLA Executive Committee Division on Criticism, 2020-
American Comparative Literature Association Essay Prize Committee
Committee Chair, MLA Executive Committee Division on Psychological Approaches to Literature, 2014-2015
Member, MLA Executive Committee Division on Psychological Approaches to Literature, 2011-2016
Manuscript Reviewer: University of Chicago Press, Stanford University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Fordham University Press, SUNY Press, Northwestern University Press, Duke University Press, Bloomsbury, Verso Books, Theory & Event, Cultural Critique, Genre, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, Mediations, Modern Language Quarterly, Novel, Studies in the Novel, New Literary History, PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, ELH,
UNIVERSITY SERVICE
Bargaining Committee, UIC United Faculty, September 2021-January 2023
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English, Aug 2021-
Associate Head, Department of English, Jan 2016-Aug 2020
Honors College Fellow, 2010-present
Provost’s Commission on the acquisition of John Marshall Law School, 2017-2019
Library Advisory Committee, 2016-2018
LAS Freshman Success Initiative Hiring Committee 2013-2015