Lee Konstantinou

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Biography

I am a new assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My interests include 20th and 21st C. U.S. literature and culture, media studies, science fiction, encyclopedic narrative, literatures of globalization, the legacy of theory, and sociological approaches to the study of literature and culture.

I received my BA from Cornell University in 2000, where I earned a rank of summa cum laude for my undergraduate thesis, "Comics and the Holocaust: (A)n (Auto/bio)graphical Analysis of Art Spiegelman's 'Maus.'"

In August 2009, I received my Ph.D. from the English department at Stanford; my dissertation was titled, "Wipe That Smirk off Your Face: Postironic Literature and the Politics of Character."

From 2009 to 2011, I was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford. As a PWR teaching fellow, I taught a number of intensive writing-oriented seminars, including "The Rhetoric and Politics of Irony," "Rhetoric, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds," and "Rhetoric in Crisis!"

From 2011 to 2012, I was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the English Department at Princeton University. At Princeton, I taught "Rise of the Graphic Novel" (lecture course), "Science Fiction in Global Perspective" (lecture course), and "Literature and Culture after 9/11" (seminar).

At the University of Maryland, I am teaching a number of new seminars, including "Postmodern Literature," "Twentieth-Century Fiction," and "The Global Graphic Novel." 

My first novel, Pop Apocalypse, was released in May 2009 by Ecco/HarperCollins. I've taught a number of creative writing courses for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Educational Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY).

I am working on a critical book on the politics of irony in postwar American fiction and intellectual life. This study discusses literary irony through the analysis of specific countercultural figures or oppositional character types: the hipster, the punk, the believer, and the coolhunter. This book, tentatively called Postirony: Countercultural Fictions from Hipster to Coolhunter, is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Portions of this project have appeared in boundary 2 ("The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition") and The Legacy of David Foster Wallace ("No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief"), which I co-edited with Samuel Cohen.

Website

http://www.leekonstantinou.com/