Timothy Lem-Smith Assistant Professor of English
Bio
Ph.D. in English, University of Toronto
M.A. in English, University of Toronto
B.A., Joint Honours English and History, McGill University
Areas of Expertise
Contemporary American Literature and Culture, Multiethnic Literature, Asian American Literature, African American Literature, Genre, Critical Theory, Theories of Race and Ethnicity, Paranoia
Courses I Teach
EN235: African American Literature
EN390: Contemporary Multiethnic Genre Fiction
EN110: Apples and Angels: Cultural Narratives of New York and Los Angeles
EN325: Critical Theory
EN236: Asian American Literatures
EN280: Graphic Novel
EN410: Paranoia in Literature and Culture.
Research
My research examines the conceptual paradigms and modes of praxis that are made available by contemporary literature and culture. I seek to discover the social and political dimensions of cultural forms that proliferate in the present, from multiethnic literatures grappling with how to represent and enact social justice, to genre fictions that offer critical diagnoses of the present and utopian visions of the future, to visual media that renovate the political potentials of our most popular and pervasive modes of representation.
My first book-in-progress, “Black and Yellow: Paranoid Aesthetics and Racial Critique in the American Contemporary” argues that recent African American and Asian American literary and cultural texts by the likes of Colson Whitehead, Ted Chiang, Jordan Peele, Karen Tei Yamashita, Suzan-Lori Parks, Percival Everett, and others reimagine various styles of paranoid thought as resources for a radical and generative racial critique of the present.
I am also working on a second book project, which examines the contingencies of race and form in the recent “genre turn.”
Publications
“Otherwise, What?: Racial Formlessness and the End(s) of the Contemporary,” (Co-authored with Henry Ivry) forthcoming in Post*45 Special Issue, “What Was Contemporary Literature? or, The End of Periodization as We Know It.” (2027)
“‘It always pays to give white folks what they want’: Percival Everett’s James and the Exhaustion of Racial Form,” forthcoming in George Kowalik and Keith Mitchell (eds.), New Perspectives on Percival Everett, Manchester University Press. (2027)
“Astro-logic: Conspiracy as Compensation and the Palliative Paranoia of Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, & Theory 79.2 (Summer 2023): 35-63.
“Colson Whitehead’s Paranoid Styles.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 56.1 (Spring 2023): 21-38.
“Global Weirding and Paranoid Worlding in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 69.1 (Spring 2023): 73-96.
“The ‘Con’ in Conspiracy: Racial Violence as Political Assassination in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 46.2 (Summer 2021): 24-42
Awards and Recognitions
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dartmouth College