Benjamin Balthaser

Benjamin Balthaser, Associate Professor of English

Contact Information

Office Location: Wiekamp Hall, Room DW3177
Office Phone: (574) 520-4221
E-mail: bbalthas@iu.edu

Go Here for current Office Hours

Other Things:

https://iusb.academia.edu/BenjaminBalthaser

Education:

Ph.D. Literature and Cultural Studies, University of California, San Diego
M.F.A. English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
B.A., English, University of Washington, Seattle

About

Benjamin Balthaser’s scholarship, teaching, and creative work investigates the relationships among social movements, racial identity, and cultural production. His book from University of Michigan Press' Class and Culture Series, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War explores the connections between cross-border, anti-imperialist movements and the making of modernist culture at mid-century . Balthaser’s critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and publications such as American Quarterly, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Reconstruction, Criticism, In These Times, Cultural Logic, Minnesota Review, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He also published a collection of poems about Jewish victims of the blacklist titled Dedication, that appeared from Partisan Press in the fall of 2011.

The courses Balthaser currently teaches range in topics from African-American literature, labor and literature, surveys of U.S. multi-ethnic literature, cultures of U.S. modernism and post-modernism, creative writing, the U.S. West in literature, and freshman composition. He currently enjoys living in South Bend, and participates when he can in the St. Joseph Valley Project and helps maintain a bi-weekly reading group on issues of labor, social movements and culture.

Interests

Nineteenth and twentieth century multi-ethnic U.S. literature
American studies in a transnational context
Transnational social movements
Modernism in a global context
Creative writing
Poetry and poetics
Literature of U.S. expansionism, nineteenth and twentieth century
Film and popular culture

Courses Recently Taught at IU South Bend

English L354: U.S. literature from 1914-1960
English W203/6: Introduction to Creative Writing
English T190/390: Labor and Literature
English L680: Radical Modernism
English E110: Diversity and U.S. Literature
English L379: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States
English T190: Beyond Cowboys and Indians: Myths of the U.S. Frontier
English 130/131: Composition
English W513: Writing Poetry
English L460: African-American Literature from 1845-present
English L501: Reading Richard Wright
English L371: Contemporary African American Literature
English L351: Antebellum U.S. Literature

Recent Publications

Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, University of Michigan Press, Class/Culture Series, December 2015. https://www.press.umich.edu/7381040/anti_imperialist_modernism

Dedication, a collection of poetry based on the lives of Jewish labor activists, from Partisan Press, fall 2011, http://bluecollarholler.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-from-partisan-press.html

"The Dialectics of Race: Proletarian Literature, Richard Wright, and the Making of Revolutionary Subjectivity," Historical Materialism, 29(2), 119-142 https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341956

"Mike Gold, the Writer Who Believed Workers Could Speak for Themselves," Jacobin Magazine (July 2021) https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/mike-gold-literature-jewish-american-proletariat-red-left?fbclid=IwAR1Hf9gTFWoikpoF4-LAaOYIRvvB3fA6ldDiAACCANLTbyyX0eRQhN8JH5U

"On Thoreau: Staying Behind," Another Chicago Magazine (June 2020)
https://anotherchicagomagazine.net/2020/05/27/on-staying-behind-by-benjamin-balthaser/

"On Hearing the News of a Friend's Death While in Honolulu, November 2019," Big City Lit (Summer 2021) https://nycbigcitylit.com/article/on-hearing-the-news-of-a-friends-death-while-in-honolulu-november-2019/

"Ghazal for Foley," What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, Martín Espada, ed.
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/content/what-saves-us-0

"When Anti-Zionism Was Jewish: Jewish Racial Subjectivity and the Anti-Imperialist Literary Left from the Great Depression to the Cold War"
American Quarterly Volume 72, Number 2, June 2020
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/758945

"Horror Cities: Contesting the Ruins of Capitalism in Contemporary Genre Cinema"
Camera Obscura (2020) 35 (1 (103)): 139–159.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-abstract/35/1(103)/139/164221/Horror-CitiesContesting-the-Ruins-of-Capitalism-in?redirectedFrom=fulltext

"Travels of an American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia: Re-thinking Indigenous Modernity and the Popular Front in the Work of Archie Phinney and D'Arcy McNickle," American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 1 (March 2014).

"Death and Life of the Jewish Century", Boston Review, March 2019, http://bostonreview.net/politics/benjamin-balthaser-death-and-life-jewish-century

"Killing the Documentarian: Richard Wright and Documentary Modernity," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 55.3 (Fall 2013).

Mass Shooting and the Spectacle of Whiteness, Public Seminar, April 13, 2018: http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/04/mass-shooting-and-the-spectacle-of-whiteness/

"Racial Violence in Black in White: Lynching Photography and the Documentation of Police Violence," Boston Review, (July 2016), reprinted and translated into French for Contreligne - Rédaction.

"The Fatal Machine: The Post-War Imperial State and the Radical Novel, 1941-1949," American Literature in Transition, 1940-1950, edited by Chris Vials, Cambridge University Press.

"The Race of Class: The Role of Racial Identity Production in the Long History of U.S. Working Class Writing," Working-Class Literature(s): Global and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Magnus Nilsson and John Lennon, Stockholm University Press.

"Modernism or Barbarism: Marshall Berman and Modernism in the Streets" Jacobin Magazine, May25, 2017.

"Colonies and Capital: Archie Phinney and Indigenous Marxism," Jacobin Magazine, November 16, 2016.

"For Jim Foley, October 18, 1973 -- August 19, 2014," Massachusetts Review, September 2015, 56 (4)

"Epitaph for a Bronx Accent," Tablet, November 2016 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/215862/epitaph-for-a-bronx-accent

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