Patrick Deer

Associate Professor of English

Education

Ph.D., 2000 (English) with Distinction, Columbia University; B.A. Hons, 1988 (English Literature) First Class, Balliol College, Oxford.

Areas of Research/Interest

Modernism; war culture and war literature; contemporary British literature and culture; the novel, film, and music; Anglophone literature and human rights.

External Affiliations

Editorial Board, Social Text; Editorial Board, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance; Advisory Board, Program in Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies, NYU; Advisory Board, The Space Between Society; Modern Language Association; American Comparative Literature Association; Modernist Studies Association.

Fellowships/Honors

Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, Center for the Humanities, NYU, 2015-2016; Faculty Speaker, Undergraduate Research Conference, College of Arts and Sciences, April 2015; Invited Faculty Speaker, Freshman Convocation, College of Arts and Sciences, NYU, August 2014; Humanities Initiative Research Collaborative Funding for Cultures of War and the Post-War Research Collaborative, NYU, 2014-2015; Golden Dozen Outstanding Teaching Award, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, New York University, 2005; University Research Challenge Fund Fellowship, NYU, 2003-2004; President's Fellow, Columbia University, 1996-1999; Mellon Research Travel Fellowship, Columbia University, 1997; Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellow, Columbia University, 1988-1991; Higgs Scholar, Balliol College, Oxford, 1986-1988.

Bio

Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at New York University, where he focuses on war culture and war literature, modernism, and contemporary British and American literature and culture, and Anglophone literature and human rights. He was Director of College Honors Programs for NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences from 2011-2014. His first book, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; paperback, forthcoming Fall 2015), explores the emergence of modern war culture in the first half of the 20th century. He argues that the British state and war machine actively cannibalized culture as it reinvented itself in times of crisis and focuses on the struggle of writers and intellectuals to find their own perspectives on total war.

He is currently working on two book projects about twentieth and twenty-first century transatlantic literature and culture: Deep England: Forging British Culture After Empire, focuses on the second half of the twentieth century and explores tropes of violence, consumption, secrecy, dissent and nostalgia in a national literature and culture that he argues has actively resisted decline and decolonization between 1945 and 1979. Surge and Silence: Understanding America’s Cultures of War, explores contemporary US and British war culture since 1989 and focuses in particular on literature, film and media from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Patrick Deer is also co-organizer of NYU’s Cultures of War and the Post-war research collaborative, which aims to contribute to the debates around war culture and to produce concrete outcomes for post-war cultural policies which bridge the divides between academia, veterans, the military, activists, writers and creative artists.

His recent graduate courses have included “Imperial Modernism,” “War Culture,” “Late Modernism,” “The Contemporary Novel and the Culture of War,” and “Transatlantic Modernism,” co-taught with Prof Peter Nicholls. His undergraduate teaching focuses on war culture and war literature, modernism, twentieth century British and American literature and culture, literature and popular music, and the novel and film.
 

Publications

  • “Rupture or Continuity? The Myth(s) of the War,” in Teaching Representations of the First World War. ed. Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee. (New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming 2016)
  • “Coda: ‘The Cassette Played Poptones’: Punk’s Pop Embrace Of The City In Ruins,” Punk and Its Afterlives: Special Issue, Social Text 116, Fall 2013) vol. 31.3, 147-158
  • “Punk and Its Afterlives: Introduction,” with Jayna Brown and Tavia Nyong’o, Punk and Its Afterlives: Special Issue, Social Text 116 (Fall 2013) vol. 31.3, 1-11
  • “Two Cities: Berlin and New York,” Chapter 3 in W.H. Auden in Context. Ed. Tony Sharpe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, February 2013)
  • “Two Cities: Berlin and New York,” Chapter 3 in W.H. Auden in Context. Ed. Tony Sharpe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, February 2013)
  • “Auden and Wars,” Chapter 15 in W.H. Auden in Context. Ed. Tony Sharpe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, February 2013)
  • “‘Scattered But All Active’: Ford Madox Ford and Transatlantic Modernism,” in Ford Madox Ford and America, International Ford Madox Ford Studies series 12 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012)
  • “Culture,” in Collective History: Thirty Years of Social Text, Social Text 100 (Fall 2009), vol. 27.3, 85-91. Ed. Brent Hayes Edwards and Anna McCarthy.
  • “Introduction: The Ends of War and the Limits of War Culture,” The Ends of War: Special Issue, Social Text 91 (Summer 2007) vol. 25, no. 2, 1-11.
  • “The Dogs of War: Myths of British Anti-Americanism,” in Anti-Americanism, ed. Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross, New York University Press, 2004. 158-178.
  • “Defusing The English Patient,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, Basil Blackwell, 2004. 208-232.
  • “A Day That Will...: The New York Media Landscape and Urban Space after September 11,” with Toby Miller, in The Cities of Everyday Life, ed. Ravi Sundaram, Sarai: New Delhi, 2002.
  • Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature
    Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; paperback, forthcoming Fall 2015