Professor

Email: s dot shapiro at warwick dot ac dot uk

FAB5.22

Humanities Building, University Road
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

About

Born and raised in New York State, my first degree was in Chemistry. After deciding that my future did not rest in refluxing organic solutions, I went to graduate school in English. During that time I studied at the Department of Cultural Studies (Birmingham University, England) and briefly researched at the Gramsci Institute in Rome. Returning to the US, I worked as a graphic designer, had some art installations exhibited, and became involved in ACT UP/NY. Destiny brought me back to the Midlands.

Before joining Warwick, I taught at Harvard University, the New School, and John Jay College for Criminal Justice (CUNY). I have also been a Fulbright scholar at the University of Saarland, Germany (1997-98). In 2008-09, I was a Royal Shakespeare Company/Capital Fellow in Creativity and Performance. In 2010, a visiting Professor at the University of California, Irvine and in 2015 back at Irvine as a University of California Humanities Research Institute fellow. During 2021-22, I was a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg. In 2024, I had a fellowship at Babeș-Bolyai University's (Romania) Academic Research Network of Excellence.

Research interests

I am currently working on two book projects: The Cultural Fix: Marx and the Organic Composition of Capital. This uses a reading of the bridge between the French edition of Capital 1 and the second volume of Marx's Capital, written simultaneously, to supplement British Cultural Materialism.

The second project is tentatively called The Twist: Capital, Data, and Cultures of the Intersectional Left. This argues for the entanglement of three different capitalist temporalities in the contemporary moment that is distinguished by data-driven neoliberalism, the return of unapologetic fascism, and a new intersectional left.

Other projects hovering in the background are: From Gothic to God: Horror in America (an examination of the production of American gothic, including illuminati panics and their transformation into religious revivalism in the early nineteenth century) and The Anti-Capitalist Foucault (a reading of Foucault's works of the 1970s as a supplementary history and critique of capitalism).

With Sharae Deckard and Mike Niblett, I recently published Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Literature, World-Ecology(SUNY Press, 2024). Two 2022 essay collections are The Cambridge Companion to American HorrorLink opens in a new window (edited with Mark Storey) and Decolonizing;the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Culture, and MediaLink opens in a new window (Bloomsbury, co-edited with Giulia Champion and Roxanne Douglas).

A few shorter pieces on Un-noveling Lovecraft CountryLink opens in a new window, editing Charles Brockden BrownLink opens in a new window, and Frida Kahlo and Christian PetzoldLink opens in a new window have appeared.

My research interests focus on writing and culture of the United States; Cultural Studies; literary theory; marxism, world-systems analyses; urban and spatial studies, and television studies. For a more complete list of publications, see this pageLink opens in a new window. For a curated list of videos from Occupy Wall Street, see this pageLink opens in a new window.

I have also worked as a member of WReC (Warwick Research Collective), a group interested in moving beyond older models for literary and cultural studies. WReC published its first collective findings in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP 2015).

I was one of the founding co-directors of the Warwick Centre for Global Jewish StudiesLink opens in a new window and am currently serving on the universities Race Equality Taskforce, after having been part of the group that successfully applied for a Race Equality Charter Mark (Bronze).

Teaching and supervision

The modules that I taught in 2023-24 were:

• EN336: States of Damage: Twenty-First Century US Writing and Culture
• EN391: American Horror Story: U.S. Gothic Cultures, 1790-presentLink opens in a new window
  
  Past modules:
• EN361: Introduction to Alternative LifeworldsLink opens in a new window
• EN371: Cultures of Abolition: Slavery, Prison, Debt, and Data

• EN344: Representing Depression: Aesthetics, Insight, and Activism
• EN942 World Literature and World-Systems: A New Model for Literary Studies

• EN213: US Writing and Culture, 1790-1920
• EN264: Explorations in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
  
  

  Introductions for CB Brown's "plague" long-fictions (for free download

• Introduction to Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, Charles Brockden Brown (Hackett edition)Link opens in a new window

• Introduction to Ormond: Or, the Secret Witness, Charles Brockden Brown (Hackett edition)Link opens in a new window
  
  "Antonio GramsciLink opens in a new window"

• Curriculum Vitae (Jan. 2022)Link opens in a new window

Selected publications

• Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, World-CultureLink opens in a new window (with Sharae Deckard and Michael Niblett), (SUNY Press, 2024).

• The Cambridge Companion to American HorrorLink opens in a new window (ed. with Mark Storey) (2022).
• Decolonizing;the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Culture, and MediaLink opens in a new window  (eds. with Giulia Champion and Roxanne Douglas) (Bloomsbury, 2022).
• Neoliberalism and Contemporary American LiteratureLink opens in a new window, (co-edited with Liam Kennedy), UPNE-Dartmouth College Press, 2019.
• World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of DiscontentLink opens in a new window (co-edited with Sharae Deckard), Palgrave, 2019.
  Best Collection Award 2019, British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS)
• Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden BrownLink opens in a new window, (co-edited with Philip Barnard and Hilary Emmett), Oxford, 2019.
• The Political Pamphlets, The Collected Works of Charles Brockden Brown, Vol. 4,Link opens in a new window 
  (co-edited with Mark Kamrath and Maureen Tuthill)
  Modern Languages Association/Committee on Scholarly Edition (MLA-CSE), (Bucknell UP), 2020.
• Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-systems Culture, Bloomsbury, 2017.
• The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-systemLink opens in a new window, Penn State P, 2009.
• Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-LiteratureLink opens in a new window (as part of WReC - the Warwick Research Collective), Liverpool UP, 2015.
• The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre (with Liam Kennedy), U Michigan P, 2012.
• Critical translation of The Productive Body (Guéry and Deleule) with Philip Barnard, Zero Books, 2014.
• How to Read Foucault's Discipline and PunishLink opens in a new window, with Anne Schwan, Pluto P, 2000.
• How to Read Marx's CapitalLink opens in a new window, Pluto, 2008.
• Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar HuntlyLink opens in a new window: 4 Vol. Set (with Philip Barnard), 2008-14.
• an edition of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of WomanLink opens in a new window (with Philip Barnard), Hackett, 2013.
• Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early RepublicLink opens in a new window (with Philip Barnard and Mark Kamrath), U of Tennessee P, 2004.

Recent Articles (from 2014)

• “Zemiperiphery Matters: Immigration, Culture, and the Capitalist World-System” inWallerstein 2.0: Thinking and Applying World-Systems Theory in the 21^st Century, Frank Jacob, ed (Transcript Press, 2023).

• “Literary Value, Cultural Fixes, and Commodity Chains” in Der Wert der literarischen Zirkulation/The Value of Literary Circulation, Michael Gamper, Jutta Müller-Tamm, David Wachter, and Jasmin Wrobel, eds. (J. B.Metzler, 2023), 187-202.

• “Algorithmic Capitalism, Digital Machinofacture, and the Productive Body” (with Philip Barnard) in The Body Productive: Rethinking Capitalism, Work and the Body, Steffan Blayney, Joey Hornsby and Savannah Whaley, eds. (Bloomsbury, 2023), 203-218.

• “Un-Noveling Brown: Liberalism and its Literary Discontents” (with Philip Barnard) in Early American Literature, 2022 (57:2), 549-554.

• “Introduction to “Symposium on Scholarly Editing and New Charles Brockden Brown Studies” (with Elizabeth Hewitt and Karen Weyler) in Early American Literature, 2022 (57:2), 531-535.

• “American Horror: Genre and History” (with Mark Storey) in The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, edited by Stephen Shapiro and Mark Storey (Cambridge UP), 1-11.

• “Conjunctures, Commodities, and Social State MarxismLink opens in a new window” in “Periodizing the Present: The 2020s, the Longue Durée, & Contemporary Culture,” Treasa De Loughry and Brittany Murray, Comparative Literature and Culture, 2022 (24:1),

• “Decolonizing the Zombie: I Walked with a Zombie’s Critique of Centrist Liberalism” in An “Other” Zombie Project: Decolonizing the Undead, Giulia Champion, Roxanne Douglas, and Stephen Shapiro, eds. (Bloomsbury 2023), 40-57.

• “Decolonizing Zombie Cultural Practice: An Afterword” in An “Other” Zombie Project: Decolonizing the Undead, Giulia Champion, Roxanne Douglas, and Stephen Shapiro, eds. (Bloomsbury 2023), 209-214.

• “World-Systems and Literary Studies” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics, Paul Crossthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 196-211.

• “Algorithmic Neoliberalism’s Bonfire of Semiotics,” American Studies/Amerikastudien, 67:1 (2022), 17-19.

• “Un-noveling Lovecraft Country,” November 2021, Post45 online cluster on “Literary Television” https://post45.org/2021/11/un-noveling-lovecraft-country/

• “Collectivity and Crisis in the Long Twentieth Century” (co-authored as Warwick Research Collective)

  MLQ 81:4 (2020), 465-89.

• “Speculative Nostalgia and Media of the New Intersectional Left: My Favorite Thing is Monsters” in The Novel as Network: Literary Forms, Ideas, Commodities, Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl, eds. (Palgrave, 2020), 119-136.

• “Woke Weird and Cultural Politics of Camp Transformation” in The American Weird: Ecologies and Geographies, Julian Greve and Florian Zappe, eds. (Bloomsbury, 2020), 55-71.

• "Algorithmic Television in the Age of Large-Scale Customization,” Television and New Media 21:6 (2020), 658-663.

• "Caesarism Revisited: Cultural Studies and the Question of Trumpism” in Trump’s America: Political Culture and National Identity, Liam Kennedy, ed. (Edinburgh UP, 2020), 53-71.

• "The Cultural Fix: Capital, Genre, and the Times of American Studies” in The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel, eds. Vincent Dussol and Jacques-Henri Coste (Palgrave, 2020), 89-108.

• “Charles Brockden Brown and the Novel in the 1790s” (with Mark Kamrath and Philip Barnard) in A Companion to American Literature, Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1820, ed. Theresa Strouth Gaul, (Blackwell, 2020), 445-461.
• “Foucault, Neoliberalism, Algorithmic Governmentality, and the Loss of Liberal Culture” in Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, eds. Kennedy and Shapiro, 43-72.
• “Translatability, Combined Unevenness and World Literature in Antonio Gramsci” (with Neil Lazarus), Mediations (2018), 1-35.
• “World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System: An Introduction” (with Sharae Deckard) for Deckard and Shapiro, World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent (Palgrave, 2019), 1-48.

• “The World-Literary System and the Atlantic: Combined and Uneven Development – an interview with Stephen Shapiro,” Atlantic Studies 16:1 (2019), 7-20.

• “Liberalism and the Early American Novel,” American Literary History (2019), 777-787.
• “The Weird’s World-system: The Long Spiral and Literary-Cultural Studies,” Paradoxa, 28 (2016), 256-277.
• “Realignment and Televisual Intellect: The Telepraxis of Class Alliances in Contemporary Subscription Television Drama” In: Class Divisions in Serial Television, Sieglinde Lemke and Wibke Schniedermann, eds. (Palgrave, 2017), 175-203.
• “The Culture of Realignment: Enlightened and ‘I can’t breathe’” In: Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture: Axes of Influence, Doug Haynes and Tara Stubbs, eds. (Routledge, 2017), 144-161.
• “WReC reply to respondents,” [David Damrosch (Harvard); Sarah Brouillette and DAvid Thomas (Carleton); Barbara Harlow (UT Austin); Joshua Clover (UC, Davis) and Maria Elisa Cevasco (Sao Paulo, Brazil)] forum on Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, 2016 Comparative Literary Studies, 53:3 (2016), 535-50.
• “Homeland’s Crisis of Middle Class Transformation,” Cinema Journal, 54:4 (Summer 2015), 152-8.
• “From Capitalist to Communist Abstraction: The Pale King’s Cultural Fix,” Textual Practice, 28:7 (2014), 1249-71. Reprinted in How Abstract is It? Thinking Capital Now, Peter Nichols and Rebecca Colesworthy, eds. (Routledge, 2015).
• “Zombie Health Care” In: This Year’s Work from the Zombie Research Center, Aaron Jaffe and Ed Comentale, eds. (U of Illinois P, 2014), 193-226.

Report by the Assembly Working Party on Antisemitism and Racism (AWP)

On 28 February 2024, Warwick's Assembly voted 91% in favor of approving the AWP report.

The AWP report can be found here:
for downloadLink opens in a new window