Professor Hamilton Carroll

Profile

I joined the School of English at the University of Leeds in 2006.

I obtained my PhD in English Literature and American Studies from the University of Indiana--Bloomington in 2003 before undertaking postdoctoral appointments at Georgia Institute of Technology (2003-5) and University College Dublin (2005-6).

Responsibilities

• Director of Research and Innovation
• Deputy UoA Lead

Research interests

I have a wide variety of research interests, including twenty-first and twentieth-century US literature, American Studies, film studies, US culture studies, gender and masculinity studies, US racial formations, memory cultures, and globalization. My work is broadly interdisciplinary and-within the framework of a critical US American Studies-interrogates the effects of globalization, neoliberalism, and transnationalism on the cultural forms of the contemporary nation-state. I am particularly interested in the effects of such macrological forms on the micrologies of national identity, citizenship, and subjectivity. As such, my work moves beyond the confines of a nationally bound attention to race, class, and gender by interrogating the dialectical processes through which such terms gain, maintain, and lose their focus.

I am currently working on two  book-length monograph projects: I am completing work on a project that examines novel-length fiction about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the 2008 financial crisis. I have recently beguna project that explores cultural representations of white working-class identity in the age of Trump.

In my book, Affirmative Reaction: New Formation of White Masculinity, I explore the cultural politics of heteronormative white masculine privilege in the United States. Through close readings of texts ranging from the popular television drama 24 to the Marvel Comics miniseries The Call of Duty, and from the reality show American Chopper to the movie Million Dollar Baby, the book argues that the true privilege of white masculinity-and its defining strategy-is not to be unmarked, universal, or invisible, but to be mobile and mutable. Affirmative Reaction describes how, in response to the perceived erosions of privilege produced by post-civil rights era identity politics, white masculinity has come to rely on the very discourses of difference that unsettled its claims on the universal; it has redefined itself as a marginalized identity.

I was co-investigator on two AHRC-funded projects: a Research Network on the subject of ‘Home, Crisis and the Imagination’, and a Connected Communities scoping project, 'Imagining the Place of Home'.

Qualifications

• PhD English Literature and American Studies
• MA English Literature
• BA

Professional memberships

• American Studies Association (USA)
• British Association of American Studies

Student education

I teach across the cirriculum in the School of English, offering specialist option modules at BA and MA level on contemporary US literature and culture.

Research groups and institutes

• American Studies Research Group

Current postgraduate researchers

• Michael Bowden
• Jess H. Anderson
• Georgia Walton
• Craig McDonald
• Lizzie Wright