Timothy Brennan
Professor
Ph.D. Columbia University, 1987
204 Nicholson Hall
612-626-1638
brenn032@umn.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Timothy Brennan's research and teaching are interdisciplinary and comparative. He works in nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature (especially the European and American novels and the literatures of Latin America), the relationship between comparative literature, “world” literature, and global English. He writes on issues of intellectual history, theories of culture, the Marxist and phenomenological traditions, the avant-gardes, imperial culture and colonial history, translation theory, and popular music (primarily Afro-Latin music and hip hop). He is the author most recently of Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia UP, 2006). A former consultant for American Public Television, his recent books include At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard UP, 1997) and the forthcoming Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Verso, 2008). He is the editor and co-translator of Alejo Carpentier’s Music in Cuba (U of Minnesota P, 2001). The Director of the Humanities Institute between 2002-2004 and the Editor of "Cultural Margins" a book series at Cambridge University Press (1998-2003), he received in 1989 an award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for his special issue of Modern Fiction Studies titled "Narratives of Colonial Resistance" (1989). A frequent public speaker nationally and internationally, he has worked as an international news features broadcaster for WKCR-FM (New York) and has appeared as a featured guest on Chicago Public Radio. His essays have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, French, Slovenian, Hungarian, and Japanese, and his writing has appeared in a variety of publications including The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Critical Inquiry, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Public Culture, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the London Review of Books.
Department Affiliations
English; Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature; American Studies; Humanities Institute
Areas of Expertise
Continental literary and cultural theory; 19th- and 20th-century comparative literature; postcolonial studies; music of the African diaspora; problems of world literature and translation; theories of colonialism; intellectuals and the media
Selected Publications
Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz. New York: Verso, 2008.
Empire in Different Colors/Another Finger Exercise. Timothy Brennan and Szacsva y Pal. Frankfurt: Revolver, 2007.
Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Music in Cuba. Carpentier, Alejo. Ed. Timothy Brennan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. London: Macmillan, 1989.
"A Subtle Barbarism." Toronto Star 3 September 2006, Sunday ed.
"Resolution." Critical Inquiry 31:2 (Winter 2005).
"Edward Said and Comparative Literature." Journal of Palestine Studies 33:3 (Spring 2004).
"The Subtlety of Caesar." Oxford University Press, Interventions 5:2 (Fall 2003).
"Postcolonial Studies Between the European Wars: An Intellectual History." Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. Ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Graduate Courses
The Basic Seminar
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory
Theories of Globalization
Poets of Commodities: Economics and Cultural Theory
World Literature and Comparative Literature: Problems of Translation
Gramsci/Gramscians: Intellectuals, Society, Theory
The British Empire
Said, Vico, and the Historicist Tradition
Marxist Literary Theory
Contemporary Responses to Hegel: Badiou, Zizek, Anderson
Undergraduate Courses
The Figure of the Stranger in Literature
Marx, Freud, Nietzsche: Intellectual Foundation
How to Read the Newspaper
Popular Music and Protest: The Neo-African Aesthetic
The Origins of Cultural Theory
Poetry of the Caribbean
Red, White, & Black: Race & Culture in the Americas
New York Bohemia: 1950 - Present