James H. Rudy Professor, English
Associate Chair, English
Affiliate Professor, Gender Studies
( he / him / his )
I joined the Department of English in 2007 after three years at Penn State University. My research focuses on modern American literary studies (especially 1914-1945), American cultural studies, and LGBTQ studies as well as subfields such as critical rural/regional studies and material culture studies. I have published three books: Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York University Press, 2010; Lambda Literary Award), and The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014). My essays have appeared in journals such as PMLA, GLQ, American Quarterly, American Literary History, Criticism, Public Culture, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere. I also serve on the Editorial Advisory Board of Modern Fiction Studies, the Advisory Boards of Journal of Modern Literature and Genders, and the Editorial Board of Soundings. My current research has been supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
“Regional Modernisms.” Special Issue of MFS Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (2009): 1-194.
Autobiography of an Androgyne, by Ralph Werther. Scholarly edition of 1919 text with critical introduction, textual introduction, and textual notes. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
“Brokeback Mountain Dossier.” Special section of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.1 (2007): 93-109.
“The Ancients and the Queer Moderns.” Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies by Samuel Ryan See. Ed. Christopher Looby and Michael North. New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming.
“The Sexual Imaginarium: A Reappraisal” (with Karen Tongson). GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25.1 (2019): 51-56.
“Eve Sedgwick’s ‘Other Materials’.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23.1 (2018): 5-18. Special issue on “Queer Objects” edited by Guy Davidson and Monique Rooney.
“On Late-Life Samuel Steward.” Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic: Sexuality, Literature, Archives. Ed. Debra A. Moddelmog and Martin Joseph Ponce. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 68-82.
“The Sexual Objects of ‘Parodistic’ Camp.” Modernism/modernity 23.1 (2016): 5-8, 34. “Camp Modernism Forum” edited by Marsha Bryant and Douglas Mao.
“Djuna Barnes and the Geriatric Avant-Garde.” PMLA 130.1 (2015): 69-91.
“The LGBTQ Novel.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: US Fiction from 1940. Ed. Deborah Williams and Cyrus R.K. Patell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, submitted.
"Queering the American Modernist Novel." The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel. Ed. Joshua L. Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 122-36.
"Rural." Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. Rev. ed. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 217-20.
“‘Hixploitation’ Cinema, Regional Drive-ins, and the Cultural Emergence of a Queer New Right.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20.1-2 (2014): 95-113. Special double issue on “Queering the Middle: Race, Region, and a Queer Midwest” edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, Chantal Nadeau, Richard T. Rodríguez, and Siobhan B. Somerville.
"Material Deviance: Theorizing Queer Objecthood." Postmodern Culture 21.2 (2011): 45 pars.
"Collyer Curiosa: A Brief History of Hoarding." Criticism 53.2 (2011): 159-89.
"Erotic Uncreativity: A Response to Steven F. Kruger." American Literary History 22.4 (2010): 945-50.
“Tillie Olsen, Unfinished (Slow Writing from the Seventies).” Studies in American Fiction 37.1 (2010): 81-99.
"Micro: Region, History, Literature." American Literary History 22.3 (2010): 626-34. (review essay)
“The Hoosier Apex.” Southern Communication Journal 74.3 (2009): 243-51. Special issue on “Queering the South” edited by Charles E. Morris III.
“Southern Backwardness: Metronormativity and Regional Visual Culture.” American Studies 48.2 (2007): 37-48. [published 2008]
“Out of the Closets, Into the Woods: RFD, Country Women, and the Post-Stonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-urbanism.” American Quarterly 59.2 (2007): 341-372. Reprinted in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977. Ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
“Keith Haring and Queer Xerography.” Public Culture 19.2 (2007): 329-348.
“Catherian Friendship; Or, How Not To Do the History of Homosexuality.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.1 (2006): 66-91.
“Caravaggio’s Rednecks.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.2 (2006): 217-236. Special issue on “Art Works” edited by Richard Meyer and David Román.
"Spoon River Anthology's Heterosexual Heartland." Literature Compass 3.3 (2006): 256-69.
“Willa Cather’s Lost Boy: ‘Paul’s Case’ and Bohemian Tramping.” Arizona Quarterly 60.2 (2004): 87-116.
“Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet.” PMLA 117.3 (2002): 414-427.
"Makeovers: Regional Universalism and the Newer South's Public Spheres." The Southern Quarterly 41.1 (2002): 87-105.
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Manor: Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of Publicity." African American Review 35.4 (2001): 581-98.
The College of Arts