Jason Berger
Professor
- Phone: 713.743.5834
- Email: jberger2@uh.edu
- Office: 235D Roy G. Cullen Building
- CV
Jason Berger is a professor of 19th century American literature and critical theory. He is the author of "Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America" (Fordham University Press, 2020), which offers a new approach toward antebellum political personhood that challenges liberal-humanist perspectives, and "Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America" (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which was nominated for the MLA First Book Prize and explores how maritime narratives negotiated developing global realities. He is currently working on a book titled, “Whale Undone: Ecologies of Actuality.”
Education
- Ph.D., University of Connecticut
- M.A., University of Vermont
- B.S., Central Connecticut State University
Research Interests
Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Critical Theory (Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Posthumanism, Queer Theory, New Materialism), Environmental Humanities
Books
- "Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America" (Fordham University Press, 2020)
- "Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America" (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
- "Whale Undone: Ecologies of Actuality" (In progress)
Selected Articles & Chapters
- “Insurgencies from There There.” MELUS (forthcoming)
- “Roberto Bolaño’s Moby-Dick: Unflattening Formalism.” Cultural Critique 107 (Spring 2020): 29-62.
- “Emerson’s Operative Mood: Religious Sentiment and Violence in the Early Works.” Studies in Romanticism 54 (Winter 2015): 477-502.
- “Travel.” Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context. Ed. Wesley T. Mott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 49-56.
- “The Political Fantastic: Žižek, Fantasy, and a New Autonomous Aesthetics.” The Minnesota Review 79 (October 2012): 53-77.
- “Antebellum Fantasies of the Common Sailor; or, Enjoying the Knowing Jack Tar.” Criticism 51.1 (Winter 2009): 29-61.
- “Killing Tom Coffin: Rethinking the Nationalist Narrative in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot.” Early American Literature 43.3 (November 2008): 643-671.
- “Refiguring O’Neill’s Early Sea Plays: Maritime Labor Enters the Age of Modernity.” The Eugene O’Neill Review 28 (May 2006): 13-31.