Fields: American literature, African American literature, theory and criticism, race, modernity and modernism, the novel
Biography:
Anoop Mirpuri is an associate professor and director of the MA program in English. He received his PhD from the University of Washington and his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to arriving at Portland State, he served as research fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.
His research explores the relation between race, aesthetics, and the field of literary studies. He received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for his current research project, which explores how racial empiricism has shaped assumptions about the relation between identity, authorship, and cultural property in the literary world. He has also written widely about the history of policing and the increased reliance on criminalization and punitiveness under neoliberalism.
He teaches courses on American literature, African American literature, modernism, the novel, literary theory and criticism, as well as genre courses on the slave narrative and crime fiction.
On the PSU faculty since 2012.
Articles:
- “A Correction-Extraction Complex: Prison, Literature, and Abolition as an Interpretive Practice,” Cultural Critique 104 (Summer 2019).
- "Protecting Inequality," Oregon Humanities (Fall/Winter 2017).
- “Racial Violence, Mass Shootings, and the U.S. Neoliberal State,” Critical Ethnic Studies 2.1 (2016): 73-106
- "Mass-Incarceration, Prisoner Rights, and the Legacy of the Radical Prison Movement," in The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration. Eds. Deborah McDowell, Claudrena Harold, and Juan Battle. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press (2013).
- "Why Can't Kobe Pass (the Ball)? Race and the NBA in an Age of Neoliberalism," in Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports. Eds. David Leonard and C. Richard King. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield (2011).
Selected Publications:
- “Why Do We Have Police?”, All Rise Magazine (Summer 2020).
- "Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War: An Interview with Derek Gregory." Co-authored with Keith P. Feldman and Georgia M. Roberts. Theory & Event 12.3 (2009).
- "Antiracism and Environmental Justice in an Age of Neoliberalism: An Interview with Van Jones." Co-authored with Keith P. Feldman and Georgia M. Roberts. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 41.3 (2009).
- "Theories of Race in the Twentieth Century," Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896-Present: From the Age of Segregation to the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press (2009).