Image Credit: Jeph Jacques, of questionablecontent.net.
I’m an English professor currently serving as adjunct faculty at the University of Delaware and the Community College of Philadelphia. I specialize (implied scarequotes) in the fuzzy venn-diagram-shaped space between genre fiction, writing studies, postcolonial theory, adaptation and global anglophone cultural studies. I teach mainly introductions to literature, world literature surveys, and first year writing, along with developmental writing at the community college level.
In terms of texts to teach and study, I favor genre fiction in print, film, television, and games, and I specialize in South Asian and East Asian postcolonial genre fictions in my research arena. I occasionally link this work to late-19th century “canonical” works, particularly when talking about transcultural adaptation, colonialism, and genre. World crime fiction–and worlding crime fiction–has been my focus in this area since 2015 and especially since I finished my Ph.D. in 2019.
For instance, my dissertation applies theories of adaptation and a postcolonial lens to the global anglophone detective fiction genre in order to reveal how 1. academic discussion and histories of the genre are inherently colonial exercises, replicating long-outdated discourses and cultural ideas, including a tacitly unequal notion of authorship, 2. how detective fiction produced or adapted in postcolonial environments are marked as colonially subordinate, and 3. how these texts, along with their fandoms and scholarly afterlives, can (and often do) turn this subordinate position into a subversive advantage.
My other current research interests revolve around manifestations of colonial discourses, and neocolonial attitudes, in contemporary genre fiction (especially crime and speculative fiction), and on how authorship is imagined, politicized, and contextualized in genre fiction spaces. I’m also particularly interested in the way popular literary figures are constructed as trans-, super- or post-human, and how such critical models enable new readings of embodiment, accessibility, disability, belonging and subjectivity in an increasingly post-national and intersectional world. In a related way, I often find myself drawn into disability theory, writing studies and pedagogy, the digital humanities, games studies, and literary historiography.
My primary corpus of texts includes 19th, 20th and 21st century popular texts from the Anglophone world, with a particular emphasis on the United States, South Asia and East Asia. While most of my texts are currently in English, I am currently progressing towards literacy in Bangla/Bengali, with the eventual objective of expanding my archive to include critical and creative work in global varieties of English (where I already possess fluency), Bangla and Hindi. I also need to learn Bangla to speak to my grandparents-in-law. I also read Spanish, though this is more strongly connected to my daily life than to my academic research.
A list of my research presentations, publications, and courses taught are available in the CV tab above.
Michael B. Harris-Peyton 