Associate Professor

Email: m.abramson@warwick.ac.uk

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Room 5.34, Faculty Arts Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7EQ

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About

I joined the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies in September 2017. Before this, I was a lecturer at the King’s College London. I have also worked and studied at universities in Canada and the US. From 2020-2022, I was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at the JFK Institute, Freie Universität Berlin.

Research Interests

My research areas include modern and contemporary American literature, urban geography, Marxist-feminist theory, world-ecology, and increasingly the global proletarian novel and post-socialist literature. I am broadly interested in the literary and cultural geographies of US hegemony. My first book Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Cultural Origins of Neoliberalism (Fordham University Press 2018) looks at the moment of US hegemony's consolidation in the post-WWII era and argued for the centrality of 1950s US urbanisation projects in the transformation of both the modernist novel and the emergence of neoliberalism.

My second book, Cartographies of Empire: the Road Novel and US Hegemony (forthcoming, Stanford University Press 2025) offers the first comparative account of the global “road novel.” Drawing on an archive of over one-hundred road novels, from countries including the US, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia, this book challenges dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Instead, grounding its analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Cartographies of Empire argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony’s global trajectory

I am currently beginning a new project that returns to the often marginalised archive of US proletarian fiction and re-reads it in relationship to what has in relation to the Soviet or “Red World” Literary system with an eye towards rethinking the importance of its aesthetic and political interventions for our contemporary moment.

Teaching

In 2023/24, I’m teaching on the modules Modes of Reading and, alongside Dr. Mike Niblett, Global Literary Radicalisms: Proletarian Literature from the Russian Revolution to Anticolonial Resistance. In the past, I have taught on the modules, States of Damage, Twentieth-Century US Literature, US Writing and Culture 1780-1920, and on the MA Module, World Literature and the Anthropocene.

I'm interested in supervising projects that engage with any of the research areas listed above.

Selected Publications

• Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and the American (Stanford University Press, 2025)
• Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Cultural Origins of Neoliberalism (Fordham University Press, 2018)

• “Countertopographies of Copper: Martha Rosler, Chris Kraus and the Great Arizona Copper Strike of 1983-1986,” Feminist Studies special issue “Social Reproduction Feminism and World-Culture,” eds. Sharae Deckard and Kate Houlden. 2 (2024), 149-161

• “Concrete Illuminations: the Short Story and/as Urban Revolution” The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, eds. Michael Collins and Gavin Jones (Cambridge University Press 2023), 251-268

• “Streets and Roads,” The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English (with Sam Weselowski), ed. Matthew Stratton, (Routledge 2023), 375-386

• "Cruising the Real Estate of Empire: The Road Novels of Chris Kraus" Contemporary Literature 62.1 (2022), 67-96
• “Answering the Call: Telephonic Fascism and Faulkner’s Angel of History.” Faulkner and Money. Ed. Jay Watson. (University of Mississippi Press, 2019), 208-230
• “Chile-Seattle-Cairo 1973 - ?; or, Globalization and Neoliberalism.” Wiley Blackwell Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory Ed. Szeman, Imre, et al. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell (2017), 147-166
• “Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art” in Neoliberalism and American Literature. Eds. Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard. (University Press of New England, 2019), 73-91
• “States of Salvation: Wise Blood and the Rise of the Neoliberal Right” PMLA 132.5 (2017), 1166-1180
• “Atlas Shrugged’s Shock Therapy.” Modern Fiction Studies 63.1 (2017), 73-94
• “From Utopian Institution to Global University: Simon Fraser University and the Crisis of Canadian Public Education” with Enda Brophy Edu-Factory 1 (2011), 6-21