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.
