Joshua Beall

Dr. Beall earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Rutgers University in 2010. His dissertation, “The Poetics of Subversion” examines the use of irony as a structural component of modernist novels from Central Europe, showing how the authors in his study employ irony to subvert inherited narrative forms that they view as complicit with nationalist and imperialist attitudes.   His interest in the relationship between narrative form and ideology carries over into his teaching, where his goal is to help students understand how form structures their encounters with texts.   Beall’s professional interests include interdisciplinary writing, literary theory, psychoanalytic theory, world and comparative literature, Central European literature and cinema (especially the cinema of the Czechoslovak New Wave!), the history and theory of the novel and modernism.   In the summer of 2013, Beall attended the Institute for World Literature, hosted by Harvard University. Since then, he has been interested in the pedagogical implications of new theories of world literature both as a corrective to the nation-based model of comparative literature and as a conceptual means for helping students to understand the ways in which their own worldviews are already international.

• Doctorate – comparative literature – Rutgers University
• Master's – comparative literature – Rutgers University
• Bachelor's – comparative literature – University of Georgia

• World and comparative literature
• Literary and psychoanalytic theory
• History and theory of the novel
• Central European literature and cinema
• Modernism