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, 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
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 current book project, provisionally entitled “The Paranoid Aesthetic: Conspiracy, Critique, and Contemporary American Literature,” argues that recent fiction by the likes of Colson Whitehead, Karen Tei Yamashita, Suzan-Lori Parks, Percival Everett, and others reclaims various styles of paranoid thought as resources for a radical and generative critique of the present. Portions of this project appear in journals such as Novel: A Forum on Fiction, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS: Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States, and Arizona Quarterly.
I am also working on a second book project, which examines the contingencies of race and form in the recent “genre turn.”
Publications
“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