Assistant Professor, English Department
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2006
MA., The Johns Hopkins University, 1994
tel.: (607) 777-2353
fax.: (607) 777-2408
email: jkeith@binghamton.edu
Areas of Interest
Modern U.S. and British Literature
Comparative Imperialisms
Marxism and Marxist Cultural Studies
Globalization
Postcolonial Theory
Anglophone Caribbean Literature
Current Projects
Cold War Cosmopolitanisms: Development, Decolonization, and The Unclaimed Spaces of Modernity
The project identifies a canon of authors whose work during the early Cold War can be understood as an effort to imagine forms of belonging in the world beyond the domain of modern citizenship. It examines how these literary interventions, emerging from the shadows of a global economic order increasingly dominated by the U.S., provide a new paradigm for the cognitive mapping of the early Cold War; they also allow us to interrogate the processes that structure citizenship, national identity, and literature within a critical global frame.
Books and Recent Articles
"The Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways of the Cold War: C.L.R. James, Herman Melville, and the Limits of the Liberal Nation-State" in Calibrations: Sizing up Spaces, Communities and Selves (forthcoming)
Between the Local and the Global: Immigrant Communities at the Storefront Documentary funded by the New York Council for the Humanities/National Endowment for the Humanities
Recent Courses Taught
Intro to Theory/Criticism
Modern British Literature: Immigration, Nation, Empire
American Literature and Empire
