Erin Greer

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 beginning to work on a second book, tentatively titled Justice Beyond the Human in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, which asks––with works of contemporary Anglophone fiction by Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, JM Coetzee, Indra Sinha, and Margaret Atwood––how our democratic and ethical “conversations” can and must change to suit contemporary global interconnections, new technologies, and nonhuman perspectives and concerns.

Publications

“The Lyric Gift”: Political and Literary Judgment in Ian McEwan’s Saturday
2024 - publications

Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation, Edinburgh University Press. 2023 - book

Erin Greer, “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 - Review

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

“Something that would have been somebody,” Salmagundi 208-209. * Listed as notable in Best American Essays, 2021. 2020 - Essay

“Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage in George Meredith’s The Egoist,” Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding, ed. Garry L. Hagberg. 2018 - Chapter

“‘A Many-Sided Substance’: The Philosophy of Conversation in Woolf, Russell, and Kant,” Journal of Modern Literature 40.3. 2017 - Article

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Additional Information

Podcast interview about Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation

I was recently interviewed about my first book 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.