Professor
Office: Clemens 319
Phone number: 645-0672
E-mail address: jamesholstun@hotmail.com
Interests:
neocolonialism and world literature, global communism and radicalism, feminism and marxism
Courses taught:
- World Literature; Israeli and Palestinian Culture; Modern Arabic Novel; Arab Women Writers; Proletarian Epic; Radical American Novel; African-American Slave Rebellions; Literature and Society in Western New York; Marxist Theory; Beauvoir, Fanon, and Sartre; Ngũgĩ and Neocolonialism; Feminism and Marxism
Work in progress:
- “Agnes Smedley in China.”
- “The Cave and the Checkpoint: Realism, Modernism, and Palestine in Khalifeh and Khoury”
- “‘Mr. Kayerts, He Is Dead’: Conrad, ‘Outpost of Progress,’ and Heart of Darkness”
- “Antigone Becomes Jocasta: Soha Bechara, Résistante, and Incendies”
- “Polishing the Pearl: Alifa Rifaat and Same-Sex Djinn.”
- “The White Highlands and the National Bourgeoisie: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Vernacular Socialist”
Selected publications:
- Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (Verso, 2000). Winner of 2001 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
- A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (Oxford, 1987).
- “Utopia Pre-Empted: Kett’s Rebellion, Commoning and the Hysterical Sublime.” Historical Materialism 16.3 (2008): 1-51.
- “The Giant’s Faction: Spenser, Heywood, and the Mid-Tudor Crisis” (The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2007).
- “The Spider, the Fly, and the Commonwealth: John Heywood and Agrarian Class Struggle.” (ELH, 2004).
- “Pham Thai, Michael Sprinker, and John Holstun: Chemical Herbicide and the Indirect Costs of Production (Minnesota Review, 2003).
- “Was Marx a Nineteenth-Century Winstanleyan? Communism, George Hill, and the Mir.” (Prose Studies, 1999).
- “‘Will you rent our ancient love asunder?’: Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton” (ELH, 1988).
