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Timothy Melley
Director of the Humanities Center and Professor
English

Timothy Melley

Contact Info

(513) 529-5290
English Department

Research Interests

  • U.S. literary and cultural history since 1950
  • The Cold War and the "War on Terror"
  • Modernism and postmodernism
  • Security and secrecy in democratic society

Courses Taught

  • English F110: “The American Suburb” (first year seminar).
  • English 101H: “Race Relations in Classic American Literature” (honors seminar).
  • English 101H: “The Elusive Past” (honors seminar).
  • English 111: “The Limits of Free Expression” (college composition).
  • English 141: “Life and Thought in American Literature to 1865.”
  • English 142: “Life and Thought in American Literature, 1865-1945.”
  • English 143: “Life and Thought in American Literature, 1945-Present.”
  • English 144: “Major American Authors.” 
  • English 220: “Literature and Film”d
  • English 225H: “The City, the Suburb, and the American Dream” (advanced composition).
  • English 225H: “Writing about Conspiracy Theory” (advanced composition).
  • English 226: “Introduction to Creative Writing.”
  • English 263: “Literature and Medicine.” 
  • English 276: “The Great American Novel, 1900-Present.”
  • Honors 295: “Introduction to Cambridge University.”
  • American Studies 310: “Special Topics in American Studies: The Cold War.”
  • English 320: “Intermediate Creative Writing: Fiction.”
  • Honors 320: “Selwyn College Seminar” (conducted at the University of Cambridge).  
  • English 353: “American Literature, 1865-1914.”  
  • English 354: “American Literature, 1914-1945.”
  • English 355: “American Literature, 1945-Present.”
  • English 453: “Twentieth-Century American Literature.”
  • English 490: “Cold War Culture.” 
  • English 490: “Terrorism and Culture.” 
  • English 490: “Literatures of the Future.” 
  • English 495: “History, Postmodernism and American Fiction” (senior capstone seminar).
  • English 495: “Paranoia and Conspiracy in Postwar American Culture” (senior capstone).
  • English 495: “Reality, R.I.P.?: Simulation, Representation, and Postmodernism (senior 
  • capstone seminar).
  • English 495: “This is the End: Narratives of Catastrophe in the Anthropocene” (senior capstone).
  • English 495: “Secrecy, Democracy and the ‘Post-Truth’ Public Sphere” (senior seminar).
  • English 603: “Literary and Cultural Theory” (graduate seminar).
  • English 650: “Fiction Writing Workshop” (graduate seminar).  
  • English 680: “The Threat of the Modern” (graduate seminar).  
  • English 690: “Technology and Agency in Postwar America” (graduate seminar).
  • English 690: “Postmodern Historiographies” (graduate seminar). 
  • English 690: “Modernism in America” (graduate seminar).
  • English 690: “Postmodernism, History, and U.S. Cultural Memory” (graduate seminar). 
  • English 690:  “Trauma and History in Postmodern U.S. Culture” (graduate seminar).
  • English 690: “The Idea of the Postmodern” (graduate seminar).
  • English 690: “Secrecy and Spectacle from Cold War to ‘War on Terror” (grad. seminar).
  • English 690: “Fiction and the National Security State” (graduate seminar).
  • English 690: “Terrorism, Security, and Representation” (graduate seminar).
  • English 690: “Democratic Security Society” (graduate seminar).
  • English 690: “Democracy and the ‘Post-Truth’ Public Sphere” (graduate seminar).
  • English 690: “Literatures of the Future” (graduate seminar).

Education

  • Ph.D. English and American Literature, Cornell University (1995)
  • M.A. English and American Literature, Cornell University (1993)
  • M.F.A. Fiction, Cornell University (1993)
  • M.A. English Literature, University of Cambridge (1989)
  • B.A. Biology and English, Amherst College (1985)

Publications

Books

  • The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.  (Reviewed in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, Choice, American Literature, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Postmodern Culture, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Journal of Popular Culture, History, Journal of American Studies, Literature and History, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, History Workshop Journal, Academia.com, Electronic Book Review.  Discussed in Los Angeles Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Smithsonian Magazine, Knack, BBC Radio, The Conversation, and a forthcoming documentary film.)
  • Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.  (Reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, The Village Voice, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Theory and Event, Theory and Society, Pynchon Notes, Journal of American Studies, Symplokē, The Sociological Review.  Discussed in the L.A. Times, Le Figaro The Village Voice, Psychology Today, Scientific American, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, International Business Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Canadian Public Television, Newstalk Radio Ireland, AOL.on, and several Public Radio International programs.)

Books in Progress

  • “The Risk Imaginary: Political Fictions of the New Security Society.” Nearly completed manuscript of 75,000 words.
  • “Staring into the Sun: Stories.”  Completed manuscript of 80,000 words under revision.
  • “Exposed!  Democracy, Suspicion, and the Melodrama of Revelation.”  Manuscript in early development (60,000-75,000 words projected).

Articles

  • “A Sketch of Conspiratorial Reason.” Theory/Conspiracy.  Ed. Frida Beckman and Jeffrey Di Leo.  Routledge. Forthcoming 2023. 
  • “The ‘Post-Truth’ Public Sphere.” Conspiracy / Theory.  Ed. Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen.  Durham, N.C.: Duke UP. Forthcoming in 2023. 8738 words.
  • “Security’s Fictions.” The Cultural Turn in Intelligence Studies. Ed. S. D. Willmetts.  Washington: Georgetown University Press.  Forthcoming 2023.  
  • “The Conspiracy Imaginary.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 89.3 (Fall 2022): 757-785. 
  • “The Melodramatic Mode in American Politics, and Other Modes of Narrative Suspicion.”  Symplokē 29:1-2 (2021): 59-76. 
  • “Bipolar Citizenship: Security State Allegory from the ‘War on Terror’ to the Obama Era.” Threat Communication and the US order after 9/11: Medial Reflections. Ed. Vanessa Ossa, David Scheu, and Lukas R. A. Wilde. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. 102-122. 
  •  “War After War: Narrating State Violence in an Age of Security,” English Language and Literature 66.2 (2020): 217-231.  
  • “Conspiracy in American Narrative.” The Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Ed. Michael Butter and Peter Knight. New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2020.  427-438. 
  •  “The Public Sphere Hero: Representations of Whistleblowing in U.S. Culture.” Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy. Ed. Kaeten Mistry and Hannah Gurman.  New York: Columbia UP, 2020.  213-242.
  •  “Security.” Critical Terms in Futures Studies. Ed. Heike Paul. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan: 2019: 267-272. 
  •  “War on Terror.” American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010.  Ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. 275-290.  
  • “Public Secrecy and the Democratic Security State.”  Perspectives on Europe 45.1 (Fall 2015): 12-19.
  • “Security, Secrecy, and the Liberal Imaginary,” Telos 170 (special issue on Security and Liberalism, ed. Johannes Voeltz), (Spring 2015): 149-67.
  • “Zero Dark Democracy,” Narrating of 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Ed. John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.  17-39.
  •  “Covert Spectacles and the Contradictions of the Democratic Security State,” Storyworlds 6.1 (special issue on Cultural Narratives, ed. David Shumway), (Summer 2014): 61-82. 
  • “Imagining Social Influence: The Cultural Work of Suspicion in the Postwar United States” Dialogi: Revua za Kulturo in Druzbo. (Dialogues: Revue of Culture and Society) 3-4 (2011): 90-103.  Simultaneously printed as “Predstavljati si družbene vplive: kulturne študije o sumničavosti v povojnih Združenih državah.” Trans. to Slovenian by Boris Vezjak, 95-106. 
  • “Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of Cold War.” Grey Room 45 (Fall 2011): 18-39.
  • “Paranoid Modernity and the Diagnostics of Cultural Theory.”  Electronic Book Review  (May 18, 2008).  7,300 words.  .  Reprinted in Post-Digital. Ed. Joseph Tabbi. Vol. 1. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
  • “Brainwashed!:  Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Cold War United States.”  New German Critique 103, vol. 35.1 (Spring 2008): 145-164.  
  • “Technology, Technique, Techne: Teaching White Noise.”  Approaches to Teaching Don DeLillo’s White Noise.  Ed. Timothy Engles.  New York: Modern Language Association, 2005: 73-83.    
  • “Postmodern Amnesia: Trauma and Forgetting in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods.”  Contemporary Literature 44.1 (2003): 106-131.  (Through 2013, this article was the and is still in the top five.)
  • “Modern Nervousness: George Beard, Henry Adams, and the Symptoms of Historical Change.”  Arizona Quarterly 59.1 (2003): 59-86.  
  • “A Terminal Case: William Burroughs and the Logic of Addiction.”  High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction.  Ed. Marc Redfield and Janet Farrell Brodie.  Berkeley University of California Press, 2002: 38-60. 
  • “Agency Panic and the Culture of Conspiracy.”  Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America.  Ed. Peter Knight.  New York: New York University Press, 2001.  57-81.
  • “‘Stalked by Love’: ‘Female Paranoia’ and the Stalker Novel.”  differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8.2 (1996): 68-100.
  • “Bodies Incorporated: Scenes of Agency Panic in Gravity’s Rainbow.”  Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994): 709-738.
  • “Performing Experiments: Materiality and Rhetoric in Thoreau’s Walden.”  ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 39.4 (1993): 252-277.

Fiction 

  • “Overflow.”  The Sun 429 (September 2011): 24-30.   Reprinted in “Favorites from the 
  • Archives” ().
  • “The Prince of Natick.”  Story Quarterly 40 (2004): 95-125.  Nominated by SQ for Best 
  • American Nonrequired Reading.  
  • “Behold.”  The Sun 342 (June 2004): 42-44.  Nominated by Sun for Pushcart Prize. Reprinted in “Favorites from the Archives” ().  Presented on “As the Story Goes,” Kootenay Co-Op Radio, British Columbia (July 28, 2005).  
  • “Sneaker in the Dark.”  Epoch 50.3 (2001): 298-314.
  • “Outlaws.”  Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose 28 (Winter 1998): 14-29. . 
  • “Staring into the Sun.”  The Threepenny Review 68 (Winter 1997): 16-17. 
  • “Going to the Elephant.”  The Mississippi Review Prize Issue 23.1-2 (1994): 26-51.
  • “My Crap Life.”  The Sun 224 (August 1994): 12-15. Presented on “This American Life,” 
  • Public Radio International, (November 15, 1997). Nominated by Sun for Pushcart Prize.

Opinion Pieces

  • “A Symptom of Mass Cultural Anxiety,” Op-Ed, The New York Times (Jan. 5, 2015). 

Reviews

  • Review of David Seed, Under a Cloud: Nuclear Narrative and the Cold War (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 2013), 299 pp. American Literary History (2015). 1,500 words.   . 
  • “The Sublime Object of Postmodernity.”  Review of Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.  Pynchon Notes 50-51 (Spring-Fall 2002): 122-130. 
  • “As Foolish as Words.”  Review of Leigh Buchanan Bienen, The Left-Handed Marriage, Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 2001.  American Book Review March-April, 2002.
  • “A Technological Parable.”  Review of Emily Barton, The Testament of Yves Gundron, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.  American Book Review March-April, 2000: 1+.  
  • “Conspiracy Theory and the Populist Imagination.”  Review of Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.  Electronic Book Review 10 (winter 99/00).  .

Work in Progress

Tim Melley is currently writing about the cultural politics of security.