Christopher McGowan

My academic research focuses on modernism, world anglophone literature, and the history of the novel. My first book project, Inherited Worlds: The British Modernist Novel and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre, shows how anglophone writers of the early twentieth century repurposed and recombined nineteenth-century genres and Victorian family plots as a way to both critically interrogate and attempt to salvage the ideological and aesthetic power of the British literary tradition in a new, post-imperial world.

At Yale, I teach courses on modernist literature, postcolonial theory, American politics, Marxism and culture, and the artist novel, as well as creative writing courses. I also teach in the Directed Studies program (Literature and History & Politics) and the “Six Pretty Good X” program in Humanities. My work has appeared in the journals Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Qui Parle. 

Selected Publications

“Conrad,Lawrence, and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre”; NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 56:3 (November 2023), 389-409

“Workers Entering the Prison: Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) as Imperial Labor Film”; Qui Parle 29: 2 (December 2020), 343-372