Prof. Steven Connor
Biography
I studied for a BA and DPhil in English at Wadham College, Oxford from 1973 onwards, gaining my DPhil in 1980. I became Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, London in 1980, where I was Professor of Modern Literature and Theory from 1994. From 2003 to 2012, I was Academic Director of the London Consortium Graduate Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies. I was Grace 2 Professor of English in Cambridge from 2012-2022 and, from 2018-2022, Director of CRASSH.
Research Interests
My research interests usually have their rise in the literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though most turn out to have a longer historical contour. My areas of interest have included magical thinking; the history of medicine; the cultural life of objects and the material imagination; the relations between culture and science; the philosophy of animals; the body, sense and sexuality; literature, numbers and economics; literature and technology; the history of sound, voice and auditory media; the sociopragmatics of collective feeling and fantasy; and the developing, that is, currently imaginary field of psychosocioendocrinology. I have also written on contemporary art for Cabinet, Tate Etc, Modern Painters and others, and broadcast for radio almost whenever I am asked. For the last few years, I have been taken up with matters of psychosocial rhetoric. My most recently published books are Dream Machines (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017), about the history of imaginary machines and mechanisms, which is part of the Technographies series I coedit for Open Humanities Press; The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2019), a psychopathology of intellectual life; and Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), about disagentive behaviours and actions of nonassertion, like abstinence, surrender and apology. I have recently been working on Nathaniel Fairfax, a seventeenth-century physician and Royal Society correspondent and author of A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World (1674), a metaphysics of time and space which eschews all words of Latin origin. A History of Asking, a book about begging, praying, pleading, wishing, wooing, suing, supplicating, seducing, and other forms of petitory practice, is on its way out from Open Humanities Press. Dreamwork: Why All Work is Imaginary forthcoming from Reaktion. And Styles of Seriousness, a study of the comportments of importance, will appear from Stanford University Press in 2023. I am currently working towards a book on the phantasmology of exorbitance, and writing a Critical Life of Gaston Bachelard.
Connect with Steven
Publications
A full list of my publications, along with the texts of unpublished essays, broadcasts and lectures, is provided at stevenconnor.com.
Books
Charles Dickens (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985)
Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)
—————- 2nd revised edn (Aurora COL: Davies Group Publishers, 2006)
Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)
————— 2nd, revised and enlarged edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992)
The English Novel in History, 1950 to 1995 (London: Routledge, 1995)
James Joyce (Exeter: Northcote House, 1996)
Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)
Fly (London: Reaktion, 2006)
The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010)
Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile, 2011)
A Philosophy of Sport (London: Reaktion, 2011)
Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion, 2014)
Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Living By Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (London: Reaktion/Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016)
Dream Machines (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017)
The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (London: Reaktion/Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2019)
Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)
Edited Books
(ed.) Samuel Beckett’s `Waiting for Godot’ and `Endgame': A New Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)
(ed.) Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, (`Everyman Dickens’, London: Dent, 1994)
(ed.) Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (`Everyman Dickens’, London: Dent, 1996)
(ed.) Charles Dickens (London: Longman ‘Critical Readers’, 1996).
(ed., with Daniela Caselli and Laura Salisbury) Other Becketts (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2002)
(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
(ed). Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (London: Faber, 2010)
Recent Essays
'The Matter of Beckett's Facts', Journal of Beckett Studies, 28 (2019): 5-18
‘Imaginary Energies: The Arts of Perpetuity’, in Energies in the Arts, ed. Douglas Kahn (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2019), pp. 57-85
'Professing', Critical Quarterly, 61 (2019): 41-8
'In Public', in Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 51-61
'Admiring the Nothing of It: Shakespeare and the Senseless', in Shakespeare/Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture, ed. Simon Smith (London: Bloomsbury 2020), pp. 40-61
'Datelines', in The Palgrave Handbook of Mathematics and Literature, ed. Alice Jenkins, Robert Tubbs and Nina Engelhardt (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 513-28
'Scaphander', in Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, ed. Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley (London: Reaktion, 2021), pp. 277-9
'Terry Eagleton's Divine Comedy', Theory Now, 5 (2022), pp. 82-98
Forthcoming
'Asphyxiations', SubStance (2022).
'Dissolving the People' in 'The People' and British Literature, ed. Matthew Taunton and Benjamin Kohlmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
'Consorting', Critical Quarterly (2023).
A History of Asking (London: Open Humanities Press, 2023).
Dreamwork: Why All Work is Imaginary (London: Reaktion, 2023).
Styles of Seriousness (Stanford: Stanford University Pess, 2023).