Joel Burges
- Associate Professor of English
- Program Director, Visual and Cultural Studies
PhD, Stanford University
508 Morey Hall
(585) 275-2694
joel.burges@rochester.edu
Office Hours: T 2:30-4:00pm
Research Overview
Joel Burges is the author of essays and reviews that have appeared in New German Critique, Post45, Cinema Journal, and Twentieth Century Literature. The question of time has animated his most recent book projects: a collection of 20 keyword essays, edited with Amy J. Elias, entitled Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (New York University Press, 2016), and a book entitled Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2018). His next book is entitled Literature after TV. It charts how watching television, the most significant mass medium of the second half of the twentieth century, changed how dramatists, novelists, and poets wrote, moving from the poems of Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine and the fiction of A. S. Byatt and Tom Carson to mini-series such as The Thorn Birds and War and Remembrance and shows such as MTV'sDef Poetry Jam. In examining works such as these, a new genealogy of postwar and contemporary writing emerges at the nexus of media history and literary history. He is also working on the visual culture of mass incarceration, especially the genealogical relationship between the mug shot and the prison film. Finding his home in the Department of English, he is also affiliated with Film and Media Studies, Digital Media Studies, the Graduate Program in the Digital Humanities (funded by the Mellon Foundation), and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies.
Research Interests
- Post-1945 cultural studies
- media studies
- critical theory
- American and contemporary literature