Phillip Wegner
Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar
Phillip Wegner joined the UF faculty in 1994. He received his BA from California State University, Northridge (1986), where he was named the recipient of the Wolfson Scholar Award for 1986; and his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University (1993), where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. He was the Coordinator of the Graduate Program from 2009-2012 and the Associate Graduate Coordinator from 2005-2009. He was appointed a University Research Foundation (UFRF) Professor in 2010 and the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in English in 2012.
Professor Wegner is the author of Life Between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture, 1989-2001 (Duke University Press, 2009) and Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (University of California Press, 2002), and the editor of the republication of Robert C. Elliott’s The Shape of Utopia, the collection, Darko Suvin: A Life in Letters, and a special issue of ImageText, “Animé and Utopia.” He has published more than 40 articles on topics including contemporary literature and film, twentieth-century culture, genre theory, utopian fiction, literary theory, cultural studies, Marxism, spatial theory, globalization, and science fiction, in journals such as Arizona Quarterly, Diacritics, New Literary History, Genre, The Minnesota Review, and Rethinking Marxism, as well as in a variety of edited collections. Two of his essays were the recipients of the Battisti Award for Best Essay published in volumes of Utopian Studies. Some of his recently published essays include “Lacan avec Greimas: Formalization, Theory, and the ‘Other Side’ of the Study of Culture” (Minnesota Review); “Hegel or Spinoza (or Hegel); Spinoza and Marx” (Mediations); “Greimas avec Lacan; or, From the Symbolic to the Real in Dialectical Criticism” (Criticism); “The Beat Cops of History; or, the Paranoid Style in American Intellectual Politics” (Arizona Quarterly); and “‘An Unfinished Project that was Also a Missed Opportunity’: Utopia and Alternate History in Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro” (ImageTexT).
He is currently completing work on two new books. The first is titled Periodizing Jameson; or, The Adventures of Theory in Post-Contemporary Times and will be published by Northwestern University Press’s FlashPoints series; and the second is titled Ontologies of the Possible: Science Fiction, Utopia, and Globalization and is forthcoming in Peter Lang’s Ralahine Utopian Studies book series. He is also at work on new projects on the film genre of the comedy of remarriage, late modernist culture, and literary and film representations of John Brown.
Professor Wegner was the co-organizer of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature International Conference held in Gainesville in 1997, the organizer of the Florida American Cultures Symposium in 2008, and the program chair for The Society for Utopian Studies conference in 2001 and 2007. He is the faculty advisor for the graduate student Marxist Reading Group. He is the President of the U.S. Society for Utopian Studies, a regional delegate for the Modern Language Association, and a member of the advisory boards for the Ralahine Utopian Studies book series, the Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel, ImageTexT, Utopian Studies, Criticism, and The Minnesota Review.
He received the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teacher of the Year Award in 1996 and 2000. His recent graduate seminars include “Appearance in the Court of History: Representing Revolution,” “Bridging the Pernicious Chasm: Utopia, Dystopia, and Science Fiction,” “Toward an Ethics of the Real: Reading Lacan with Badiou,” “The Persistence of the Dialectic,” and “Modernism and Revolution: Literature and Culture in the 1920s.” He has taught a wide-range of undergraduate classes in such areas as twentieth century British literatures, the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Scottish literature, Irish literature, the literature of empire, post-9/11 literature and film, the contemporary. American historical novel, late-nineteenth-century American literatures, science fiction, cultural studies, literary theory, genre theory, and the fantastic in modern world literature.
Contact
- office: Turlington Hall 4115
- voice: (352) 294-2813
- fax: (352) 392-0860
- email: <pwegner@english.ufl.edu>