Dr Jay Prosser BA, London; MA, PhD, City University of New York.
For a list of publications since 2001 click here
For a full list of publications click here
Research Interests
My teaching is concentrated as an American literature specialist; my research
interests are expansive and evolving. What drives me is a nexus of the self
and the real best summed up by this challenge -- How do I live? My grounds for
exploring the question have become less personal, but all the more urgent.
My first book, Second
Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (Columbia University
Press, 1998), looked at transsexual autobiographies and showed how the figure
of transgender
was pivotal to the queer theory emerging at the time. Not only the first presentation
of transsexuality's ‘body narratives,’ Second Skins also
returned to canonical texts. This led to Palatable
Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (Columbia
University Press, 2002), a coedition, with my colleague Laura Doan, in
which
essays classic and new debated the kind of narrative Radclyffe Hall’s
novel is. My work on body narratives has taken me in American literature to
John Updike’s textured writing and the matter of race. I have contemporary
interests, and have edited American
Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2008),
whose essays treat American writing of the last decade in light of New American
Studies.
My interest in visuality, which began with transsexual representation, has drawn
me particularly to photography: the still visual most often thought of as a
slice of the real. My book on photography, Light
in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss
(Minnesota University Press, 2004), settled on moments when photography
has allowed realisation into loss. I’ve written on photographers who interweave
the autobiographical, including Nan Goldin and Gillian Wearing. I’m now
exploring, as part of a collective, photography’s implication in atrocity:
relief or repetition? How I look at suffering is informed by my Buddhist interests,
which are both academic and my practice; I’ve started a study of Buddhism
in America -- literature, culture, theory.
I’ve travelled with my interests in autobiography also. My big writing
project at the moment is completing a family memoir involving the Baghdadi Jewish
and Chinese diasporas. This I’m doing in crucial collaboration with my
mother. Increasingly I seek out collaborative research as one way we can use
our work to break down the walls of self and real -- which, so my Buddhist teachers
show me, are the cause of our suffering.
Recent Activities
Talks on family memoir and cultural translation at conferences in 2008, Rites
of Return in New York, and International Auto/Biography Association in Hawai’i.
Photography and Atrocity (www.photographyandatrocity.org),
a collective project; conference in New York, December 2005; in Leeds, December
2007; research Website and Webcast.
British Council-sponsored UK-India Academic Network; visit to Calcutta, January
2006, during which I gave a plenary: ‘Baghdad Bombay Britain: Jewish Immigrants
from Iraq to India.’ Further to this, I was successful in attaining a
Leverhulme Visiting Professorship for Professor Krishna Sen from Calcutta University
to visit the School of English in 2008 and lecture and teach on the subject
of Transnationalism and Literature, with particular reference to American literature.
Plenary lecture at conference on Globalisation at the Centre for Research in
the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities, University of Cambridge, May 2007.
Postgraduate Supervision interests
I have supervised PhD theses on subjects such as Don DeLillo, Harlem
Renaissance literature, post-war American autobiography, and graphic novels.
I invite enquiries from potential research students in any contemporary American
areas, particularly those connecting to ideas of the real, such as memoir or
photography.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Contemporary
American Writing; African American Texts
American
Words, American Worlds, 1900-Present
Postgraduate
Themes
and Perspectives in Contemporary America
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