Faculty

Matthew Wilkens

Visiting Instructor

PhD (Literature), Duke University, 2006
MA (English), University of Wisconsin,
Madison, 2000
MS (Chemistry), University of California,
Berkeley, 1998
BS (Chemistry and Philosophy), College of William and Mary, 1996

Matthew Wilkens grew up in Rochester, New York and studied chemistry and philosophy at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He went on to receive an MS in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley before he shifted his focus to literature. He holds an MA in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a PhD in literature from Duke University. He is currently completing a book on the collapse of American modernism in the 1950s.

Matthew works on modern and contemporary literature in the United States, Britain, and the anglophone world. He also teaches and writes about literary theory and continental philosophy, about the intersection of literature and science, and has recently begun a project on computational approaches to literary study.

Areas of Study

• Twentieth-century American literature
• Modernism
• Critical and literary theory
• Literature and science
• World Anglophone literature
• Computational and algorithmic approaches to literary analysis

Fall 2006 Course

• Literature in Theoretical Perspectives (Syllabus)

Spring 2007 Course

• Literature and Science (Syllabus)

Recent Publications

• The Philosophy of Alain Badiou. Volume 17 of Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics (2005).
• "Narrating the Sublime Event." Theory@buffalo 11 (2006, forthcoming).
• "On Political Art, or, What is Metapolitical Inaesthetics?" Submitted to Cosmos and History.
• "Toward a Benjaminian Theory of Dialectical Allegory." New Literary History 37 (2006): 285-98.
• “Events as Dual and Narrative Entities in Deleuze and Badiou.” Subject Matters 2 (2005): 25-34.
• “Introduction to Alain Badiou.” Polygraph 17 (2005): 1-9.