One of the stranger features of academic life is that friends and colleagues only ever want to talk about one’s unpublished work. “What are you working on now?” is the academic’s default icebreaker. A scholar publishes an important book and then discovers to her bafflement that no one ever brings it up again. Thinking disappears into print and falls silent.
This is where we talk to critical theorists and interdisciplinary humanists about work they have already published. Several times a year, the editors of b2o will hold conversations with scholars about a significant book they have published in the past five years, asking them to revisit its arguments, respond to the scholarly reviews, update us on their thinking, and reflect on a book’s unfinished work.
1/ “Christian Thorne interviews Joe Cleary–World Literature Under American Supervision” (December 2023)