Bio

I grew up in North Carolina, was an all-conference basketball player in high school, and went to college at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I was a Morehead Scholar. After finishing an M.A. at Chapel Hill in English, I completed a doctorate at Duke University, ten miles away, where I landed at just the right time to take advantage of a remarkable collection of faculty talent (visiting faculty in those days at Duke included folks like Terry Eagleton, Toril Moi, and Franco Moretti, just to name a few). In 1990, I moved to Indiana University in Bloomington, where I stayed for eight years as an Assistant and later Associate Professor in English, American Studies, and Cultural Studies, publishing my first book, The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson with Cambridge, and co-editing with Bill Rasch a special double issue of Cultural Critique on “The Politics of Systems and Environments,” which later appeared in modified form as Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity (Minnesota, 2000). In 1998 I left Indiana to become Associate Chair of the English Department at SUNY-Albany, where I stayed until 2003. While there, three books appeared: Critical Environments from Minnesota (1998), Animal Rites from Chicago (2003), and the edited collection Zoontologies, also from Minnesota (2003). In August 2003 I moved to Houston, where I now teach at Rice University and hold the Dunlevie Chair in English previously occupied by David Minter. I’m finishing a fourth book, What Is Posthumanism?, and have completed a co-edited collection with Branka Arsic at SUNY-Albany entitled The Other Emerson, which includes contributions by Eduardo Cadava, Stanley Cavell, Sharon Cameron, Don Pease, and several others. I’m currently absorbed with editing a new series at Minnesota, called Posthumanities, which will publish about four books a year—stayed tuned to my site (or theirs) for forthcoming titles. I continue to teach courses in US literature and culture, mainly in modernism (and especially modern poetry) but also selectively in the 19th century, and I spend a good deal of time working with graduate students in areas of theoretical training such as systems theory, pragmatism, animal studies, poststructuralism and, increasingly, non-literary culture (art, architecture, etc.). Over the past decade and half, I’ve published widely on critical theory, American culture and literature, and the arts in venues such as Boundary 2, Diacritics, New Literary History, Cultural Critique, American Literature, New German Critique, Parallax, and many other leading journals. I’ve also enjoyed invitations to deliver numerous lectures, keynote addresses, plenary talks, roundtables, and seminars in both North America and Europe in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, the UCLA Humanities Consortium, The Forum for European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, and the annual Summer Academy in Frankfurt, Germany, among many others.

Cary Wolfe © 2006 Allison Hunter