Education
1995 Ph.D. American Literature, King’s College, London
1990 M.A. English Literature, Northwestern University, Chicago
1988 B.A in English, Cum Laude, Dean’s list, Tufts University, Boston
2003 BTec in Small Format Photography, Westminster Adult Education, London
Academic Employment
2018– Reader, American Literature and Culture, Goldsmiths University
2019-2020 Visiting Professorship in Art History, Doshisha and Kobe Universities, Japan.
2010 – 2018 Senior Lecturer, American Literature and Culture, Goldsmiths
2003 – Lecturer, American Literature and Culture, Goldsmiths.
1995 – 2003 Lecturer, American and English Literature, Southampton University.
1994 – 1995 Temp. Lectureship, Modernism and Critical Theory, U. of Sheffield.
1991 – 1993 Seminar Teacher and Tutor, American Literature, King’s College London
Publications
Books
The American Photo-Text 1930-1960. U. of Edinburgh Press, 2019.
New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Edited, introduced and with a contribution by CB. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
A Selfmade Surrealist – Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller. Boydell and Brewer, Camden House, 2000.
Edited Journal Volume
United States Topographics: Imaging National Landscapes. Special Edition of The Journal of American Studies, co-edited with Chris Lloyd, Vol. 54, Special Issue 3. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Selected Book Chapters
‘The Lyrical Gaze: On James Agee and Helen Levitt’s 1944 film In The Street’, in James Agee in Context, ed. by Michael Lofaro. Knoxville: U. of Tennessee Press, 2022.
‘No Ideas but In Seeing’: On Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, in Poetry and Film – Abbas Kiarostami and Jim Jarmusch, ed. by Andreas Kramer. Berlin: Faust Editions, 2020
‘From Smokescreens to Smokestacks: True Detective and The American Sublime’, in Popular Modernism and its Legacies. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2017.
‘Fragments of the Future: Walker Evans’s Polaroids – in Mixed Messages: American correspondences in visual and verbal practices, eds. Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland. Manchester: M.U.P. 2017
‘The Photo-Text’, Chapter for Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2017
‘Ruses and Ruminations: The Architecture of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ in The Centenary Edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ed. by Michael Lofaro. Knoxville: U. of Tennessee Press, 2017.
‘Sitting Pretty: Municipal Chairs in the Photography of Doisneau and Kertész in The Everyday in Modernist Practice. London: European Modernism Association, 2012.
Chapters on James Agee and Wright Morris for Fifty Key Writers on Photography, ed. by Mark Durden. London: Routledge, 2012.
‘Brassaï’s Chair, Henry Miller and The Eye of Paris’ in Text and Image Relations in Modern European Culture, ed. by Natasha Gregorian. Indiana: U. of Purdue Press, 2011.
‘Animating the Gudgers: On the Problems of a Cinematic Aesthetic in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, in New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, ed. by Caroline Blinder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
‘Introduction’, in New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, p.1-22. Ibid.
‘Through an American Lens: Alfred Stieglitz: Camera Work (1903-1917), 291 (1915-6); Manuscripts (1922-1923), in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker eds. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Vol.2 North America: 1880-1960. Oxford: O.U.P, 2010.
‘The Bachelor’s Drawer: Art and Artefact in the Work of Wright Morris’ in Writing With Light – Words and Photographs in American Texts, ed. by Mick Gidley. London: Peter Lang, 2009.
‘Not so Innocent: Vision and Culpability in Weegee’s Photographs of Children’ in Photographs, Histories, and Meanings, eds. Kadar, Perreault, and Warley. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
‘All things Either Good or Ungood: American Pictures Revisited in Jacob Holdt’s United States 1970-1975, in Deutche Börse Photography Prize 2008. London: The Photographer’s Gallery, 2008.
‘Another kind of Patriotism: Robert Frank’s The Americans’, Photography and Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Sas Mays. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005.
‘Love Under the Sky: On Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac’, in Rui Carvalho Homen and Maria Lambert, eds, Writing and Seeing: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005
‘Between the Unimagined and the Imagined: Photographic Aesthetics and Literary Illumination in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany. Amsterdam/Atlanta: DQR Studies in English Literature, 1999.
Selected Refereed Journal Articles
‘PetroChemical America: Cartographies of the Picturesque, eds. Caroline Blinder and Chris Lloyd, in Journal of American Studies, U.S.
Topographics: Imaging National Landscapes, Vol. 54, Special Issue 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
‘Looking for Harlem: The Absent Narrator in Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955)’ in Comparative Studies in Modernism, No. 13. Turin: University of Turin, 2018.
‘American Alphabet: Photo-Textual Politics in Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall’s Time in New England, 1950’, Journal of American Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
‘Citizen Photographer: Racial Discourse and Representation in the New York Photo League’, Photography and Culture. Berg Publications, 2012.
‘Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places: Brassaï’s Photographs in André Breton’s Mad Love”, Photography and Surrealism Vol. History of Photography, eds. David Bate and Ian Walker (London: Routledge, 2005).
The Transparent Eyeball: Emerson and Walker Evans’, Mosaic, A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Vol. 37, No. 4, (Winnipeg: U. of Manitoba Press, 2004).
Selected Reviews
‘Local Color – William Eggleston’s Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, Source – Quarterly Photographic Magazine. Belfast, 2016.
‘Places and Things’, A Review of American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe, eds. Curry and Esther Adler, Modernism/modernity. Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2014.
‘The Radical Camera’, A Review of The New York Photo League 1934-1951, ed. by Klein and Evans, Modernism/modernity. John Hopkins U. Press, 2012.
‘All Aboard’, A Review of A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839-1945, by Stuart Burrows, Journal of American Studies. Cambridge U. Press, 2011.
American Modern, A Review of Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke White, eds. Corwin, May, and Weissman, Modernism/modernity. Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2011.
Teaching and Convening
Undergraduate
Dustbowl to Dreamfactory: Writing and Visual Culture during the Depression
American Crime Fiction and Film Noir
Emergence of Modern America – 1895-1945
Inventing the Nation: 19th Century Literature and Culture
Further Studies in American Literature and Culture
Filming the Nation: Hollywood Cinema and Modernism 1912-1945
PostGraduate
Documenting America: The American Photo-text 1910-1960
American Literature and Culture/Core Course for American Literature Pathway, section on The Beats
Science Fiction in the United States: From AfroFuturism to Environmental Distopias
Photographing the Nation: Lewis Hine to Diane Arbus (for Doshisha University, Kyoto).
Introduction to American Art History (for Kobe University, Kobe, Japan).
Postgraduate Research supervision (MPhil and PhD)
Jonathan Wright (Black British Cinema) –2004
Helen Hanson (Womens’ Melodrama and Film Noir) –2000
Rune Graulund (Post-colonial representations of the Desert) 2008
Nicolo Giudice (Robert Frank: Serialization and Montage) 2010
Brittain Bright (Photography and Golden Age British Detective Fiction), 2015
Guy Stevenson (Henry Miller and Ezra Pound) 2015
Tanguy Harma (Eros and Thanatos in Beat Writing) 2018
Dominic Jaeckle, (Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Circulation of Ideas) 2020
Rebecca Drewry, (The Colonial Film Unit in Postwar Caribbean Culture) Ongoing
Mason Golden, (Early Faulkner and The Artist’s Narrative) Ongo
Honours/Distinctions – Grants/Fellowships
2022 Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Arts, The National Gallery, Washington D.C.
2019-2020 The Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship at Doshisha and Kobe Universities, Japan.
2008 British Association of American Studies: Founding Fathers’ Travel Award
2007 University of London: Central Research Fund, Travel Grant
2002 Arts and Humanities Research Committee, Research Leave Grant.
Selected Conference Papers and Invited Talks
April 2022, ‘Possessions and Souvenirs – The Grammar of Objects in Robert Frank’s Still Life Polaroids’, The Annual Art History Association Conference, Goldsmiths University.
March 2019, ‘An Unmade Book: Walker Evans’s 1970s Polaroids of Letters’, The British, American and French Photobook: Commitment, Memory, Materiality and the Art Market (1900-2019), Maison Française, Oxford University.
Feb. 2019, ‘Toxic Beauty: Topography and Aesthetics in Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America (2012)’, Paper by invitation, Queen’s University Belfast
Nov. 2018, ‘The Writing on The Wall: Some Notes on the Visual Ancestors of Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson’, Poetry and Movement in the Cinema of Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami Conference, Hirtzacker, Germany, Nicholas Born Foundation
May 2018, ´Culture Vulture: Dr. Lecter’s Ties and other Aesthetic Modes of Consumption in Hannibal, Madness in Popular Culture Conference, University of Edinburgh.
April 2018, ‘Petrochemical America: Kate Orff and Richard Misrach’s Cartography of Disaster’, European and British Association of American Studies, King’s College London
Nov. 2017, “Here I am”. The Vernacular Vision of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava in The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), Borders of the Visible: Intersections between literature and photography at ‘Centro Arti della Modernitá, University of Turin
April 2017 – ‘Deadly Ecologies: Photographing Pollution in HBO’s True Detective’ at The University of South West Florida, Fort Myers.
March 2017 – ‘In the Street: Helen Levitt and James Agee 1948’, Annual Screen Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Chicago.
Feb. 2017 – ‘The Industrial Sublime as Noir: Nick Pizzolatto’s True Detective’, College Art Association Annual Conference, New York.
June 2016 – ‘Smokestacks to Smokescreens: Richard Misrach, David Maisel and True Detective, American Topographics Conference, Goldsmiths University.
April 2016 – ‘The Architecture of and in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, British Association of American Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast.
April 2016 – ‘Walker Evans’s 1974 Polaroids’, European Association of American Studies, Constanta, Romania.
July, 2015 – ‘Lincoln’s Return: Portraiture and Presidency in John F. Peto’s still life paintings’, Facing America: Viewing the face in American art and visual Culture, Eccles Centre, The British Library.
Nov. 2014 – Democracy as a Common Denominator: Time in New England and Paul Strand’s Photo-Texts, Ways of Seeing: Rethinking Paul Strand’s Modernist Vision, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and University of Pennsylvania, History of Art. One of eight invited speakers.
March 2013 – ‘A Vanishing Alphabet’: Paul Strand’s Last American Photo-text Time In New England’, Retracing American Modernism After Paul Strand, University College London
Sept. 2012 – ‘Polaroid Paintings: Still Life Aesthetics in the Photography of Walker Evans and André Kertész, ‘Material Meanings” Biannual Conference European Association of Modernism, U. of Kent
June 2011 – ‘Right Fronting and Face to Face with a Fact’: Observations on the Still Life Photography of Walker Evans and Wright Morris, American Image Text Conference, U. of East Anglia.
Sept. 2010 – ‘Paul Strand’s Post-War Photography’, Art Histories, Cultural Studies and the Cold War Conference, Institute of Romance and German Studies, U. of London.
Sept. 2010 – ‘Sitting Pretty: The Municipal Chair in Modernist Photographic Practice’, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies Conference, Poznan, Poland.
Feb. 2010 – “Two Vernacular Visions: Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke White” American Studies Research Seminar, Sussex University.
June 2009 – ‘American Exodus’: Genre and Sentiment in the Work of Dorothea Lange – The Courtauld Institute. Conference: “ The Formats of Art History: The Art Book and the Exhibition” by invitation.
March 2009 – Brassaï’s Chair: On Henry Miller’s ‘The Eye of Paris’.” American Comparative Literature Society Annual Conference, Harvard University.
May 2008 – “An Elitist Vernacular: Stieglitz and the American Art Scene.” Modernism and Literature Research Seminar, U. of York.
Nov. 2007 – ‘Between Architecture and Artifact: The Regional Studies of Wright Morris’. American Writing and Photography Conference, U. of Leeds.
Feb. 2007 – ‘The Illusion of Embodiment: Cinematic Aesthetics in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.’ Conference: Re-evaluating Walker Evans and James Agee, Senate House, U. of London.
October 2006 – ‘Paul Strand’s Time in New England’ and the Erosion of Civil Liberties’, at The Second Brighton Photo Biennial: “America, Seen through photographs, darkly”
Oct. 2006 – ‘Vision and Culpability in Weegee’s photographs of children’, Photography: Theory, Practice, and Debate, Institute for Romance and Germanic Studies, Senate House, U. of London.
May 2006 – “‘This Lyrical Work’: On the Visual Vernacular of James Agee and Helen Levitt”, The James Agee Society, American Literature Association, San Francisco.
March 2006 – “Literature is Guilty”: Bataille, Sartre and The Case for Henry Miller”. Irish Association of American Studies Annual Conference, Queen’s U. Belfast.
June 2005 – ‘On the Road: Kerouac Introduces The Americans’, Time and Travel Symposium hosted by the Postgraduate School of Research U. of Copenhagen, Denmark.
April 2005 – ‘A Way of Seeing: James Agee’s Manifesto of Photography’, The Annual British Association of American Studies Conference at Oxford U.
April 2004 – – ‘Paul Strand’s Vernacular Modernism’, The Annual British Association of American Studies Conference at Manchester Metropolitan U.
March 2004 – ‘The Transparent Eyeball”: Transcendental Aesthetics in the work of Walker Evans’, The Photograph – An International Conference hosted by Mosaic, U. of Manitoba, Canada.
October 2003 – – “Love Under the Sky”: On Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959)’, Writing and Seeing Conference at U. of Oporto, Portugal.
July 2001 – “The Eye of Paris”: Henry Miller on Brassaï’. Americans in Paris: Paris in Americans Conference Hosted by the European Studies Research group, The Mona Bismarck Foundation, Paris.
Sept. 2000 – ‘Literary Illumination and Photographic Aesthetics in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’. Literature and Visual Culture Conference at St. John’s, Oxford U.
Conferences organized
June 2016 – American Topographics: Photography and the American Landscape, Goldsmiths University, co-hosted with Dr. Chris Lloyd, U. of Hertfordshire.
Sept. 2014 – ‘A Gob of Spit in The Face of Art’: A Symposium 80 Years after the publication of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Goldsmiths University.
Feb. 2007 – Re-evaluating Walker Evans and James Agee, Senate House, U. of London, with Alan Trachtenberg, Paula Rabinowitz, Blake Morrison, (amongst others).
April 2004 – The Photo-Text: An International Perspective, Senate House, U. of London.
Television, Radio, Theatre, Public Forums, and engagement
2021 Source – The Photographic Review, Photobooks – The Bookclub Test online film on Robert Frank’s The Americans
2014 Southwark Playhouse – Roundtable Discussion on Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts.
2013 SKY News – Arts Review of Baz Luhrman’s 2013 Film ‘The Great Gatsby
2012 BBC 4 News – Arts Review of Walter Salles 2012 Film ‘On the Road’
2011 Daniel Blau Gallery, London – Visiting Speaker on ‘The Beatification of Robert Frank’s The Americans
2008 BBC 4 Radio, Contributor to The Sunday Feature: James Agee American Legend.
2007 The Photographer’s Gallery, London – Book Club Evening, – Invited Guest Speaker on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
2007 Panel Discussion: Bound for Glory, America in Color exhibition, Photographers’ Gallery. London.