Associate Professor

Email: m dot abramson at warwick dot ac dot uk

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Room 5.34, Faculty Arts Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7EQ

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About

I joined the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies in September 2017. Before this, I was a lecturer at the King’s College London. I have also worked and studied at universities in Canada and the US. From 2020-2022, I was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at the JFK Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Research Interests

My research areas include modern and contemporary American literature, urban geography, Marxist theory, economic history, and feminist, queer and critical race theory. My first book Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Cultural Origins of Neoliberalism (Fordham University Press 2018) argued for the centrality of post-World War II American urbanisation projects in the transformation of both the modernist novel and the emergence of neoliberalism.

My second project, “The Road Novel’s Spatial Fix” offers the first comparative account of the global “road novel.” Drawing on an archive of over one-hundred road novels, from the US, UK, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and Latin America, the book explores how the road novel recurs and is repurposed during key flashpoints in the expansion and intensification of American empire in the post-war period.

Teaching

In 2022/22, I’m teaching on the modules Modes of Reading and Twentieth Century US Literature.

I'm interested in supervising projects that engage with any of the research areas listed above.

Selected Publications

• Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Cultural Origins of Neoliberalism (Fordham University Press, 2018)
• "Cruising the Real Estate of Empire: The Road Novels of Chris Kraus" Contemporary Literature 62.1 (forthcoming, 2022)
• “Answering the Call: Telephonic Fascism and Faulkner’s Angel of History.” Faulkner and Money. Ed. Jay Watson. (University of Mississippi Press, 2019), 208-230.
• “Chile-Seattle-Cairo 1973 - ?; or, Globalization and Neoliberalism.” Wiley Blackwell Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory Ed. Szeman, Imre, et al. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell (2017), 147-166.
• “Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art” in Neoliberalism and American Literature. Eds. Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard. (University Press of New England, 2019), 73-91.
• “States of Salvation: Wise Blood and the Rise of the Neoliberal Right” PMLA 132.5 (2017), 1166-1180.
• “Atlas Shrugged’s Shock Therapy.” Modern Fiction Studies 63.1 (2017), 73-94. 
• “From Utopian Institution to Global University: Simon Fraser University and the Crisis of Canadian Public Education” with Enda Brophy Edu-Factory 1 (2011), 6-21.