All People

Jason Puskar

  • Associate Dean, Humanities, College of Letters & Science
  • Professor, English

Education

  • PhD, English and American Language and Literature, Harvard University, 2004
  • MPhil, English Literature, University of Oxford, 1997

Research Interests

  • Late 19th and 20th Century American Literature and Culture
  • Science and Technology Studies
  • History of Photography
  • Modernism
  • Economic History and Theory

Books

The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2023. 
Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Selected Publications

“Realism and Naturalism: Into the Twentieth Century" and “Institutions of Chance Management and Production." In “1897–1990: Modern Figures of Chance: Accidents and Procedures." Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th to 21st Centuries). Eds. Anne Duprat, Fiona McIntosh Varjabedian and Anne-Gaelle Weber. Trans. Martyn Back. New York: Routledge, 2024, 329-35. 
“Naturalism and the Neoclassical Economic Sublime.” in Money in American Literature Ed. Paul Crosthwaite. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2024. 
“Liquid Chicago in Frank Norris’s The Pit.” In Chicago: A Literary History. Ed. Frederik Byrn Køhlert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 
“Hazardous Individualism.” In The Routledge Companion to Risk and Media. Ed. Bhaskar Sarkar and Bishnupriya Ghosh. London: Routledge, 2020.
“Institutions: Reading and Writing.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship. Eds. Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens, and Marysa Demoor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, 429-43.   
"Counting on the Body: Techniques of Embodied Digitality," New Media and Society 12.10 (Oct. 2019): 2242-60.   
“William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes.” In Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018, 490-507.
“"Insurance"” in Wallace Stevens in Context. Ed. McLoed, Glen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
“Hypereconomics: Frank Norris, Thomas Piketty, and Neoclassical Economic Romance” Studies in American Naturalism 12.1 (2017): 28-49.
““Hazardous Business”: Nella Larsen’s Passing and Risk Racialization” English Language Notes 54.2 (2016): 93-106.
““Black and White and Read All Over: Photography and the Voices of Richard Wright”.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 49.2 (Jun 2016): 167-183.   
“Pistolgraphs: Liberal Technoagency and the Nineteenth-Century Camera Gun” Nineteenth Century Contexts 36.5 (2014): 517-34.
“Wallace Stevens's 'Drastic Community': Credit, Suretyship, and the Society of Distrust.” In Incredible Modernism. Ed. John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2013, 181-198.   
“'Hwa Þas fitte fegde'? Questioning Cynewulf's Claim of Authorship.” English Studies 92.1 (2011): 1-19.
“Risking Ralph Ellison.” Daedalus 138.2 (2009): 83-93.
“William Dean Howells and the Insurance of the Real.” American Literary History 18.1 (2006): 29-58.