Erin Elizabeth Greer

Associate Professor — Literature

pronouns: she/her

Erin E. Greer is a scholar of literature and philosophy, whose interests include 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone literature, ordinary language philosophy, democratic theory, ethics, and emerging technologies.

JO 5.108
academia.edu page
ORCID

Professional Preparation

PhD - English
University of California at Berkeley - 2018

M.St. - English (1900-present)
University of Oxford - 2010

BA - Literature
Duke University - 2007

Research Areas

My teaching and research interests include 20th- and 21st-century British and Anglophone literature, ordinary language philosophy, political philosophy, feminist thought, and digital social media. My first book, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023), enlists literature and philosophy to clarify the idealization of “conversation” as a metaphor and practice often deemed central to ethical and democratic life. I'm at work on a second book titled Reimagining Judgment in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, which seeks––with works of fiction by Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, JM Coetzee, Indra Sinha, and Margaret Atwood; and with philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others similarly attuned to intersections between speech, ethics, politics, and aesthetics ––to update frameworks for democratic and ethical judgment to meet challenges posed by climate crisis, the breakdown of liberal institutions and humanist convictions, and emerging digital and biological technologies poised to transform our world.

Publications

"Cavell and Arendt on Conversation." In: Shmugliakov, P., Itzhaky, A., Soen, J. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to Stanley Cavell’s Aesthetic Thought. Palgrave Companions. Palgrave Macmillan.
2026 - publications

Expanding Our Conversations Of Justice: The Perfectionist Invitations Of Indra Sinha’s 'Animal’s People'. Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies. 12.
2025 - publications

“‘Going to Collage’: Ali Smith’s Autumn and Post-Liberal Democratic Imagination,” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 11(2) 2024 - publications

“The Lyric Gift”: Political and Literary Judgment in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Contemporary Literature 63 (4) 527-558; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.63.4.527. Honorable Mention, L.S. Dembo Prize for best article published annually in Contemporary Literature. 2024 - publications

Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation, Edinburgh University Press. Honorable Mention, Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize in Philosophy and Literature, Association for Philosophy and Literature. The introduction is available for free here. The full book is available to order via EUP here, or via Oxford Academic online: https://academic.oup.com/edinburgh-scholarship-online/book/58598. 2023 - publications

“Dark Posthumanism and the Novel: Zadie Smith’s NW and our Possible Futures,” Athenaeum Review 7. 2023 - publications

“Make our institutions great again,” a review of Stanley Fish’s The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump, Salmagundi. 2022 - publications

“Wages For Facework: Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ and Digital Reproductive Labor,” Camera Obscura 35.3 (105): 88-115. 2020 - publications

Additional Information

Podcast interview about Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation

Interview conducted by UTD PhD alumnus, Dr. Tong He, on the New Books Network. In this interview, we discuss the book's main arguments about novels, ethics, democratic politics, and interdisciplinary literary-philosophical criticism.