Carl White

Profile

I began as a Postgraduate Researcher in the School of English in 2018, supervised by Professor Hamilton Carroll. I specialise in twenty-first-century US literature. My doctoral project is fully funded by the AHRC through the WRoCAH consortium.

I originally joined the University of Leeds as an English Literature undergraduate in 2013, and progressed onto MA study in 2016.

Research interests

My research interests include late twentieth and twenty-first-century literature, American studies, finance, neoliberalism, film studies, gender studies, and popular culture.

My doctoral project argues that twenty-first-century US fiction represents and engages in processes of financialization. I argue that the financialization of the US economy that takes place as part of the neoliberal political project throughout the twentieth century has a considerable effect on narrative form and literary representation in the twenty-first century. In this, I am specifically thinking about space, value, labour, capital, and power. Through readings of four interrelated spaces of finance (the household, the family, the workplace, and the land), the thesis facilitates new understandings of the interplay between the financial (at global, local and individual levels) and contemporary narrative construction. Authors I examine include Jesmyn Ward, Lionel Shriver, Martha McPhee, Jess Walter, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead.

From February-March 2020, I was a Visiting Researcher at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. I explored the David Foster Wallace archives, in particular the drafts and marginalia of his unfinished and posthumously published novel The Pale King, and Wallace’s correspondance with his literary agent, marketers and publishers. This research was funded by the AHRC, through an International Placement Scheme Fellowship. 

I also recently co-edited Issue 5 of the WRoCAH Journal with Emily Reed (University of Sheffield). 

I am a peer reviewer for the BAAS Postgraduate Work-in-Progress group. 

Publications:

Peer-reviewed Articles:

• ‘“Deskless, commuteless, and theoretically omnipresent’: Work, Global Violence, and Capitalist Realism in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad’, Textual Practice (accepted, forthcoming 2021)

• ‘Brooklyn Gentrification and the Act of Settling in Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles’, Humanities, 10 (2021), 26 <doi:10.3390/h10010026>

Reviews:

• ‘Daniel Cordle, Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017)’, The British Society for Literature and Science, 2017
• ‘Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press 2014)’, The British Society for Literature and Science, 2017

Invited Talks:

• ‘Neoliberal Financialization and the Twenty-First-Century US Novel,’ University of Muenster, September 2020

Conference Papers

• ‘Household Crisis: Mortgages and Adultery in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets and Martha McPhee’s Dear Money,’ BACLS Virtual Conference, June 2020
• ‘White-Collar Work, Intensified Neoliberalism, and Valuing the Subject in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King,’ Common Ground 2019: Identifying Value(s) in Literature, Culture, and Society, Queen's University Belfast, June 2019
• ‘Work, Labour, and Financialized Logic in 21st-Century US Fiction,’ University of Leeds, March 2019
• ‘Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the Persistence of the Labyrinth,’ University of Leeds Postgraduate Conference, June 2017

Teaching:

• Writing Mentor (2020/21)
• American Words, American Worlds, 1900-present (2020/21)
• Foundations of English Studies (2019/20) 

Selected Awards:

• AHRC International Placement Scheme Fellowship (2019-20)
• WRoCAH Competition Studentship (2018-21)
• University of Leeds School of English Excellence Scholarship (2016)

Qualifications

• MA English Literature, University of Leeds
• BA (Hons) English Literature, University of Leeds