Jameson, Allegory, and the Work of Art

Thomas Laughlin is Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. He has published articles in The Henry James Review, Mediations, and Resilience. He has also contributed a chapter on Raymond Williams's concept of the structure of feeling to a collection of essays celebrating Williams's unique contributions to literary theory. 

Adam Syvertsen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. His research brings together narratology, critical theory, and the history of political economy to investigate representations of utopia since the eighteenth century, arguing for renewed attention to how forms of narrative speculation that emerge in the long nineteenth century continue to disrupt and construct our contemporary perceptions of social possibility.

José Ramos do Ó is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research examines the prevalence of allegorical forms of expression across literature, film and theory, with an emphasis on the representational impossibilities that underpin the recourse to allegorical figuration. He is also interested in genre, intermediality (particularly the "cross-contamination" between film and literature) and in other issues related to matters of representation.

Oded Nir is associate professor of Hebrew at Queens College, CUNY. He teaches and writes about Israeli culture and critical theory.

Eleanor Kaufman is Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA. She is the author of The Delirium of Praise:  Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001), Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (Johns Hopkins, 2012), and At Odds with Badiou:  Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press).

Matthew Gannon is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross. He recently received his PhD from Boston College, where his dissertation, “Modernity Against Itself: The Politics and Aesthetics of Modernist Form,” investigated differing notions of form in major modernist works. His scholarly writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Modern Fiction Studies, Feminist Modernist Studies, differences, CLCWeb, and Mediations among other venues.

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at NTNU-Trondheim. 

Ashwin Bajaj is a visiting professor in English at Williams College where he teaches and researches postcolonial and global south literatures, novel and critical theory, and dialectical thought. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as NOVEL, Textual Practice, and Postmodern Culture.

Paresh Chandra is an assistant professor of English at Williams College. He writes on poetry and poetics, questions of form and organization in literature and politics, critical and postcolonial theory, and histories of political struggle and critique. His work has been published in journals such as Radical Notes, Critique, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Philological Encounters and in volumes like Kant and Literature Studies (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Literature). 

G.S. Sahota is associate professor of Comparative Literature and South Asian studies at UC Santa Cruz.  His publications include Late Colonial Sublime:  Neo-Epics and the End of Romanticism (Northwestern), as well as articles in boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Sikh Formations.  Sahota is now writing his second book on questions of non-identity through investigations into the history of Indo-German cultural exchange and its ramifications for transnational hermeneutics.

Ericka Beckman is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the author or Capital Fictions:  The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Agrarian Questions:  The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism (forthcoming, Verso, fall 2026).  

Davis Smith-Brecheisen is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas, Dallas. He is the author of Mode of Address: The Modernist Novel and Theory After Postmodernism forthcoming from SUNY press. 

Chris Gortmaker is a Teaching Fellow in the Humanities in the Department of English and in the College at the University of Chicago. He specializes in Anglo-American modernist fiction, African American literature, the contemporary novel, ecocriticism, and critical theory. 

Emilio Sauri is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. 

Jensen Suther received his PhD from Yale University and is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. His first book, True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom, was published this fall by Stanford University Press. 

José Antonio Arellano is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Fine Arts at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He is the author of Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984, forthcoming in the Cambridge University Press Elements series (November 2025). His writing appears on nonsite.org, post45.org, and is forthcoming in ALH Online Review.  

Bio: Naima Karczmar is a PhD candidate in English and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She works on race and racial epistemologies of the eighteenth century. 

Bio: Andrew Haas is a PhD candidate in English and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, focusing on comparative modernisms, global Marxisms, and twentieth-century avant-gardes, especially as they stand in relation to theories of surplus population and global unemployment.