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Christopher Nealon

Christopher Nealon

John Dewey Professor

Contact Information

Research Interests: American literature, the critique of political economy, poetry and poetics, intellectual history

English > People > Christopher Nealon

Christopher Nealon teaches American literature, aesthetic theory, and the intellectual histories that bear on the history of poetry. He also regularly teaches courses that explore how the humanities have conceived of capitalism. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1997, and taught at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008.

He has written three books of criticism:  Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (2001), The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (2011), and Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital (2023). He is the co-editor, with Colleen Lye, of the collection After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the 21st Century (2022). He is also the author of five books of poetry, including The Shore, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Critics’ Book Circle Award. His latest volume of poems is All About You (2024).

From 2012 to 2014, he co-directed, with Professor Beverly Silver, a Mellon Sawyer Seminar at JHU on "Capitalism in the 21st Century".

He is currently completing a book called The Concept of Capital, which examines the limits of three 20th- and early 21st-century attempts to offer “big-tent” arguments for the political relevance of Marx’s work: the idea that we’re all alienated; that capital makes everything abstract and impersonal; and that we are in a terminal crisis for capitalism. In contrast to these arguments, he develops an account of how the thing about Marx’s work that seems most esoteric — his theory of value — is actually the gateway to a stronger approach to solidarity and political organization.

Podcast Appearances

  • Second Nature Podcast (hosted by Richard Todd Stafford of the George Mason University Cultural Studies Program), May 2022, on Marxism and Humanism:
  • The Dig podcast (hosted by Daniel Denvir), March 24, 2023, with Max Fox, on Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony (Duke UP 2020, for which he wrote the Introduction). 
  • New Books Network Podcast, hosted by Morteza Hajizadeh March 2023, with Colleen Lye, on their volume After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in The Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP, 2022)

 

Profile Photo by Ryan Collerd