Research Interests

Medieval Utopia

I don't mean "medieval things that look like Thomas More's utopia." As I've said a few times, I think generic conventions are an interesting but inessential part of the debate on utopia. Instead, I look at two forms of utopian thought: social dreaming and the utopian function.

Social Dreaming

Social dreaming is dreaming of a better society than the one you live in. This takes a lot of forms, even in the middle ages: monasteries, New Jerusalem, the Fürstenspiegel tradition, giant castles made of string and dreams Beryl and Fame and so on. These are exciting because they let us see not only what the political and social discourses of the middle ages were, but also how often and to what degree they were transgressed through literature.

The Utopian Function

To me, as it was to Ernst Bloch, the utopian function is anything that drives people to create something better than themselves. This can be just about anything. At some point I'll elaborate on what I mean here, but for now, the utopian function in human cultural production is that possibly progressive material, the "red thread" of history.

My dissertation does a little of both, although it spends a lot of time investigating the social dreaming of the middle ages, and only gets to the utopian function--or at least what is utopian for us now--in the conclusion. Or it will, at any rate. Right now it's mostly in my head.

Not Medieval Utopia

Well, I think I can get a lot out of "medieval utopia," but I'm also interested in Marxist Theory, Gender Theory, American Pop Culture of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and Science Fiction--you know, stuff I do in my "free time."