Princeton University

Department Member, English

About

I am currently an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the English Department at Princeton University. My interests include 20th and 21st C. American literature and culture, media studies, science fiction, the world literature debate, the legacy of theory, and sociological approaches to the study of literature and culture.

I received my BA from Cornell University in 2000. I earned a rank of summa cum laude for my undergraduate thesis, "Comics and the Holocaust: (A)n (Auto/bio)graphical Analysis of Art Spiegelman's 'Maus.'"

In August 2009, I received my Ph.D. from the English department at Stanford.  My dissertation was titled, "Wipe That Smirk off Your Face: Postironic Literature and the Politics of Character."

From 2009 to 2011, I was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. As a PWR teaching fellow, I taught a number of intensive writing-oriented seminars, including "The Rhetoric and Politics of Irony," "Rhetoric, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds," and "Rhetoric in Crisis!"

As an ACLS NFF I will be teaching "Rise of the Graphic Novel" (lecture course), "Science Fiction in Global Perspective" (lecture course), and "Literature and Culture after 9/11" (seminar).

I am also a published novelist. My first novel, POP APOCALYPSE, was released in May 2009 by Ecco/HarperCollins. I recently completed a draft of my second novel, HAMSTERSTAN.

I am presently at work on a critical book that explores the politics of irony in postwar American fiction and intellectual life. This study discusses literary irony through the analysis of specific countercultural figures or oppositional character types: the hipster, the punk, the believer, and the coolhunter. My book on irony is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

With Samuel Cohen, I am editing a collection of essays on the legacy of David Foster Wallace called THE LEGACY OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: CRITICAL AND CREATIVE ASSESSMENTS, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in 2012.

I currently blog over at Arcade (http://arcade.stanford.edu/users/lee-konstantinou).

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