Christopher McGowan

My academic research focuses on modernism, world 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  interrogate and salvage the ideological and aesthetic power of the British literary tradition in a new, post-imperial world. My academic writing has appeared in the journals Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Qui Parle. 

At Yale, I have taught courses on modernist literature, postcolonial and world-systems theory, the politics of climate change, American race and class politics, Marxist cultural theory, and the genre of the artist novel, as well as creative writing courses. With Joe Cleary, I teach seminars on Irish literature, including on the work of James Joyce and W. B. Yeats. I also teach in the Directed Studies program (Literature and History & Politics) and the “Six Pretty Good X” program in Humanities, and in summer programs, including YSS and FSY.

I am a founding member and co-organizer of the Left Literary Studies working group, and encourage those interested in the working group to write to me.

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

updated May 2025