Area(s) of Expertise: American Literature since 1865, Anglophone Modernism, African-American Literature, Literary and Critical Theory
Ian Afflerbach is an Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia. He teaches and researches in 20th century American literature and politics, modernism and modernist studies, African-American Literature, periodical culture, and the history of ideas. His current book project, Making LIberalism New, offers a literary history of American liberalism. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from ELH, Modernism/modernity, Studies in the Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, and American Periodicals.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Sinclair Lewis and the Liberals Who Never Learn: Reading Politics in It Can’t Happen Here.” Studies in the Novel. (Forthcoming)
“Surveying American Late Modernism: Partisan Review and the Cultural Politics of the Questionnaire.” Modernism/modernity Print+ 4.1 (2019): https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0102.
“Cocktails or Communism? Vanity Fair’s Belated Women of the 1930s.” American Periodicals 29.1 (Fall 2019): 26-42.
“Liberal Use of Possession: Intellectuals, Abortion, and Tess Slesinger’s Modernism.” ELH 85.3 (Fall 2018): 803-824.
“Style, Ideology, and Autonomy: Making Room for Late Modernism in the American Scene.” Literature Compass 14.10 (2017): https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12408.
“Liberalism’s Blind Judgment: Richard Wright’s Native Son and the Politics of Reception.” Modern Fiction Studies 61.1 (Spring 2015): 90-113.
“California Paranoia in Germany: Teaching the Political Aesthetic of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” Teaching American Literature in Theory and Practice 7.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 36-48.
“On the Use and Abuse of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed for Reading Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed.” Notes and Queries 259.1 (March 2014): 135-36.
Chapters in an Edited Volume
“Wright’s Contemporary Reception.” Richard Wright in Context. Cambridge UP. (Forthcoming)
Digital Projects
“Astounding Stories at War.” Digital archive built as a collaborative pedagogical project with students and archivists at Georgia Tech.
Book Reviews
Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America, by Will Norman. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 45.2 (2018): 340-343.
The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Lindsey Banco. American Literary History Online XIII (2017).
Bleak Liberalism by Amanda Anderson. Studies in the Novel 49.4 (Winter 2017): 559-561.
The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, by Fred Turner. Amerikastudien / American Studies 60.1 (Winter 2015).