Professor Jane Elliott

I came to King's in 2011 from the English Department at the University of York, where for six years I was lecturer in Contemporary Literature. I earned my BA in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and my MA and PhD at Rutgers University. Before taking up my post at York, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center at Brown University.

Research Interests

My research focuses on three main areas: contemporary literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on the intersection between vernacular forms and political theory; cultural theory; and post-war American Left political culture and aesthetics, including second-wave feminism and the New Left. My recent monograph centres on what I call 'the microeconomic mode', a dominant 21st-century cultural formation that combines aesthetic strategies of abstraction with narratives focused on extreme circumstance and threats to survival.

I welcome PhD applications in any of these research areas. For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

My teaching focuses on contemporary literature and popular culture, particularly in the American context, and various strands of political and cultural theory.

At the undergraduate level I currently teach an experimental module on ‘vernacular theory’, in which we explore the theoretical work enacted in popular aesthetic forms, and at the MA level I co-teach a module that interrogates the specific and new shapes that political violence takes in the present.

I created and with Dr Seb Franklin co-convene the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory.

Selected publications

• The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity and Contemporary Popular Aesthetics, Columbia University Press, 2018. Awarded the 2018 Monograph Prize from the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies.
•  ‘The Synthesis is in the Machine’: An Interview with Silvia Federici, Australian Feminist Studies, 33. 96 (April 2018): 172-177.
• The Microeconomic Mode: Survival Games, Life-Interest and the Re-imagination of Sovereignty, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 51.2 (Aug 2018): 210-225.
• Genres of Neoliberalism: Special Issue Edited with Gillian Harkins. Social Text, 31, 2 (115).
• Suffering Agency: Imagining Neoliberal Personhood in North America and Britain, Social Text, 31, 2 (115): 83-101.