PhD - English
University of California at Berkeley - 2018
Erin Greer
Associate Professor — Literature
pronouns: she/her
Professional Preparation
M.St. - English (1900-present)
University of Oxford - 2010
University of Oxford - 2010
BA - Literature
Duke University - 2007
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
- Honorable Mention, L.S. Dembo Prize for best article published annually in Contemporary Literature
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
Book introduction (free pdf): Conversation as Worldmaking in Literature, Philosophy and Criticism 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 - 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