English Department
Visiting Assistant Professor
Fields: Modern British, Irish, and Caribbean literature; modernist poetry, visual art, and film; environmental humanities and ecocriticism; literary theory and philosophy
Email: mgannon@holycross.edu
Office: Fenwick 225
Office Hours: MWF 10–12 and by appt
Recent Courses
- ENGL 365, Modern British Poetry: Modernism’s Unnatural Histories
- ENGL 200, Masterpieces of British Literature: Masters, Old and New
- ENGL 100, Intro to Literary Study: Weird Nature
Bio
I teach courses on modern British, Irish, and Caribbean literature here at Holy Cross. My research is concerned with the interconnections between literature's artistic significance and its political, historical, and philosophical dimensions. My doctoral research, completed at Boston College, focused in particular on Wyndham Lewis, Hope Mirrlees, and Virginia Woolf alongside modernist aesthetic philosophy, political-economic theory, and psychoanalytic thought. My research has been published in CLCWeb, differences, and several edited collections; my academic reviews have appeared in Modern Language Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Mediations; and I have written on politics and popular culture for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, and Tribune. My current research increasingly focuses on the weird, the speculative, and the unnatural in modern literature. I incorporate these interests in my literature courses, which also include films and visual artworks as well as contemporary ecocriticism and writings on the Anthropocene.
Selected Publications
“Inversion.” Co-written with Tavid Mulder. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. (forthcoming)
“Adorno as a Reader: Writing the Mediation of Literature and Philosophy.” Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation, edited by Stephen Ross, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
“The Aesthetic Death Drive of Modernism.” differences, vol. 31, no. 2, 2020, pp. 58–85.
“The Kafkaesque in the Trial of George Bluth.” A State of Arrested Development: Critical Essays on the Innovative Television Comedy, edited by Kristin M. Barton, McFarland, 2015.