Fields: Modern British Literature, Film Studies, Media Studies, Musicology/Adaptation Studies, Critical Theory
Biography:
Josh Epstein researches and teaches in 20th-century Anglophone modernism, film and media studies, and critical theory. After receiving his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, where he also taught and worked as an academic advisor, he served as an ACLS Fellow at UC Santa Barbara and a professor at Texas A&M - Corpus Christi, before joining the PSU faculty in 2014. At PSU, he teaches core classes in the English major; courses in film history and theory; “cluster” courses on the race melodrama in film, literature, and popular culture; major authors courses on Joyce, James, and Conrad; graduate seminars on modernism and “sound studies”; and topics courses on cultural and aesthetic theories of failure. He also frequently teaches ENG 531, the one-credit colloquium for M.A. students.
Prof. Epstein's first book, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer, explores the relationships among modernist literature, music, noise, and aural culture. In addition to the publications listed below, he frequently speaks and leads seminars at the Modernist Studies Association conference. His current research interests include the 1951 Festival of Britain and the documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings.
Publications:
- Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Companion playlist.
- “Listening Conducts: Music and Modernist Remediation,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, ed. Alex Goody and Ian Whittington (Edinburgh UP, 2021).
- “Scoured and Cleansed: Ezra Pound and Musical Composition,” The New Ezra Pound Studies, ed. Mark Byron (Cambridge UP, 2019).
- “Open City's ‘Abschied’: Teju Cole, Gustav Mahler, and Elliptical Cosmopolitanism.” Studies in the Novel 51.3 (2019).
- “‘We Are a Musical Nation’: Under Milk Wood and the BBC Third Programme.” Modern Drama 62.3 (2019).
- “The Antheil Era: Pound, Noise, and Musical Sensation.” Textual Practice 28.6 (2014).
- “Joyce's Phoneygraphs: Music, Mediation, and Noise Unleashed." James Joyce Quarterly 48.2 (2012).
- “Neutral Physiognomy: The Unreadable Faces of Middlemarch.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38.1 (2008).
Book Reviews and Blogs:
- Review of Michelle Witen’s James Joyce and Absolute Music, for The Review of English Studies.
- Review of David Deutsch’s British Literature and Classical Music: Cultural Contexts, 1870–1945, for Journal of British Studies.
- Blog on Daniel Cavicchi’s Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum, for Modernism/modernity’s “Re/discoveries.”
Selected Recent Publications:
- “Nuclear Family Portrait: Humphrey Jennings, the Pattern Group, and the Festival of Britain.” Paper for the Modernist Studies Association conference (Columbus, OH), November 2018.
- “Observations of Industrial Listening: War Factory and Listen to Britain.” Position paper for the Modernist Studies Association conference (Columbus, OH), November 2018.
- “Modernism and Mass-Observation,” seminar at Modernist Studies Association conference (Columbus, OH), November 2018.
- “Time-Weeping Clocks: Under Milk Wood and the Temporality of Radio.” Invited talk for the Linfield College Department of English, October 2018.
- Seminar Leader: “Cruel Modernisms.” Modernist Studies Association (Pasadena, CA), November 2016.
- “Listening Out to Britain: Civic Soundscape in Humphrey Jennings.” Invited Talk for the Musicology Faculty, University of Oxford (UK), May 2016.
- Seminar Leader: “New Adornos.” Modernist Studies Association conference (Pittsburgh, PA), November 2014.