Theodore Martin

Picture of Theodore Martin
Associate Professor, English
School of Humanities
Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 2011, English
University of California, Irvine
352 Humanities Instructional Building
Mail Code: 2650
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
20th- and 21st-Century Fiction; Popular Genres; Literary History; Literary and Cultural Theory; Literature and Society; Literature and Crime
Academic Distinctions
Honorable Mention, William Riley Parker Prize for Outstanding Essay in PMLA, 2021
Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW Madison, System Fellow, 2015
National Humanities Center, Summer Institute in Literary Studies Fellowship, 2013
Center for American Literary Studies, Penn State, First Book Institute Fellowship, 2013
Center for 21st-Century Studies, UW Milwaukee, Faculty Fellow, 2012-2013
Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, Dissertation Fellow, 2010-11
Research Abstract
My first book Contemporary Drift (Columbia UP, 2017; part of the Literature Now series) shows how the formal transformations of popular genres give us a conceptual vocabulary for explaining what it means to be contemporary. You can read the introduction to Contemporary Drift here. Here's an interview I did about the book. I'm currently at work on a new book project titled "American Literature's War on Crime." Recently, I wrote the catalogue introduction for the Costume Institute's "About Time" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Publications
ARTICLES
“The Novel and Not the Police,” Clues 40.2 (Fall 2022): 105-107

“Antisocial: A Literary History,” in The Big No, ed. Kennan Ferguson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 19-48

"War-on-Crime Fiction," PMLA 136.2 (March 2021): 213-228

"On Time," introduction to About Time: Fashion and Duration, catalogue for the “About Time” exhibition at the Met, on display October 29, 2020 to February 7, 2021

"Crime Fiction and Black Criminality," American Literary History 30.4 (Winter 2018): 703-729

"Contemporary, Inc.," Representations 142.1 (Spring 2018): 124-144

"Temporality and Literary Theory," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

“The Currency of the Contemporary,” in Postmodern/Postwar—and After, ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 227-240

“The Dialectics of Damage: Art, Form, Formlessness,” nonsite #18 (Winter 2016)

“The Long Wait: Timely Secrets of the Contemporary Detective Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45.2 (Summer 2012), special issue, “The Contemporary Novel: Imagining the Twenty-First Century”: 165-183

“The Privilege of Contemporary Life: Periodization in the Bret Easton Ellis Decades,” Modern Language Quarterly 71.2 (June 2010): 153-174
REVIEWS
Review of What Is the Present? by Michael North, ALH Online Review (Series XVIII, March 2019)

“No Uncertain Terms” (review of Seven Modes of Uncertainty by Namwali Serpell), Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49.2 (Summer 2016): 393-397
INTERVIEWS
Interviewed on "Against the Grain” on 94.1 KPFA, January 24, 2022

Interview on Columbia UP blog
Last updated
10/25/2022