Bill Brown (critical theory)


Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Visual Arts, and the College. He previously held the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professorship in Humanities and the George M. Pullman Professorship, and served as the chair of the University's English Language and Literature Department from 2006-2008. After a brief term as the Deputy Dean for Academic and Research Initiatives in the Division of the Humanities, Brown was recruited to be the new Deputy Provost for the Arts in 2014. As Deputy Provost, Brown oversees the programming and future of , serves on the Arts Steering Committee, and chairs the UChicago Art Institutions subcommittee. He also serves on a number of other committees across campus - including the Executive Committee of the - and is the principal investigator for the Object Cultures Project at The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. He has co-edited the University of Chicago's peer-reviewed literary journal, Critical Inquiry, since 1993.
Professor Brown's work focuses on American literature, with his second book, A Sense of Things, looking at the representation of objects in 19th-century American literature. His interests have since progressed to modernism. He also has a long-standing interest in popular culture, and has written about Toy Story and Westerns, among other facets of American life. His major theoretical work, however, is on Thing theory, which borrows from Heidegger's object/thing distinction to look at the role of objects that have become manifest in a way that sets them apart from the world in which they exist. He edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry on this subject, which won the award for Best Special Issue of an academic journal in 2002. His essay, "The Dark Wood of Postmodernity: Space, Faith, Allegory," which treats religious themes in the work of Marxian cultural theorist Frederic Jameson and in postmodern culture generally, was awarded the Modern Language Association's William Riley Parker Prize in 2005.
Brown has a B.A. from Duke University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University's Modern Thought and Literature program. He has been teaching at the University of Chicago since 1989.

Selected publications