Faculty

Profile

Justin Neuman is a professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School. He is the author of Fiction Beyond Secularism (2014), co-author of Modernism and Its Environments (2020), and co-editor of the "Cultural Frames, Framing Culture" series at University of Virginia Press. He has completed over fifty trail ultramarathons... and still can't outrun his inbox.

Degrees Held

Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, 2008 M.A., English Literature, Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, 2003 B.A., English Literature and Creative Writing, Dartmouth College, Magna Cum Laude, 1999

Professional Affiliation

Associate Editor, Cultural Frames, Framing Culture series, University of Virginia Press (2016–present) American Comparative Literature Association Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Modern Language Association Modernist Studies Association Society for the Study of Narrative Literature Founding Co-President, Society for Contemporary Literature (American Literature Association)

Recent Publications

Books • Fiction Beyond Secularism. Northwestern University Press / FlashPoints, 2014. • Modernism and Its Environments, with Michael Rubenstein. Bloomsbury, 2020.

Book chapters • “Energy Recognition Scenes and the Myth of Global Cooling.” In Anthropocene Reading, ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. • “Salman Rushdie’s Religious Cosmopolitans.” In Cosmopolitanism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, ed. Maria Rovisco. Routledge, 2014.

Selected articles & review essays • “Religious Cosmopolitanism? Orhan Pamuk, the Headscarf Debate, and the Problem with Pluralism.” Minnesota Review 77 (2011). • “Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime.” Criticism 53.1 (2011). • “The Fictive Origins of Secular Humanism.” Criticism 50.4 (2008). • “In Search of a Gothic Proust.” Gothic Studies 10.1 (2008). • “Imitation Games.” NOVEL (2018).

Public essays • “Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score.” Aeon, 2026. • “Scrubbing In.” The Hedgehog Review. • Contributing scholar, The Immanent Frame (2008–2012).

Performances and Appearances

Selected invited lectures: “Hannah Arendt and ‘The Crisis in Education,’” Festival of the New, The New School (2019); “Is World Literature Secular?” Rutgers (2015); “9/11 Chronomania,” Case Western Reserve (2015); “OPEC Literature,” University of the Witwatersrand (2015); “Energy Systems Literature,” Duke (2014); “Petromodernism,” Swarthmore (2014). Conference papers at MLA, ACLA, MSA, and related venues.

Research Interests

contemporary novel, religion and secularism, postsecular literature, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, modernist studies, environmental humanities, petroculture and energy, epic and tragedy, world literature, pedagogy, intelligence, artificial intelligence, civics

Awards And Honors

A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Research Fund Grant, Yale University, 2014–2015 Frederick W. Hiles Publication Fund Grant, Yale University, 2014 Dissertation Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, 2007–2008 Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, University of Virginia Phi Beta Kappa; Golden Key National Honor Society

Portfolio

Aeon — Play without keeping score

Ultra-Normal

Public Journalism

Fiction Beyond Secularism

On AI in the Classroom