Christopher Newfield

Christopher Newfield

Christopher Newfield is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in American literature from Cornell University in 1988, and his central interests include: American culture after 1830, with particular attention to fiction since 1940; race; sexuality; affect; crime; California; and corporate culture. Professor Newfield is currently at work on two projects: The Empowerment Wars, which explores the literature, management theory, and everyday life of cubicle dwellers in corporate America; and Starting Up, Starting Over, an eyewitness account of the underside of the "New Economy" in Southern California.

operating Research Grants:
     Center for Nanotechnology in Society, 5 years (Co-Principal Investigator, National Center for Engineering
     Sciences (NCES) National Science Foundation Award No. 0531184, July 2005.
     Center for Creativity and Innovation (UCSB internal start-up funds; activated 2008-).

Areas of Interest

• Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century American literature
• Literary and social theory
• Gender, sexuality, and race

Books and Recent Articles

Books

• Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class,(Harvard University Press, 2008).
• Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
• The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
• Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. with Avery Gordon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
• After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s, ed. with Ron Strickland (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

• The Cuts Report: Effects of the Governor’s Budget Proposals on the University of California, 2 Editions, January 2008 and May 2008, http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/reports/cuts.report.04.08.pdf
• Current Budget Trends and The Future of the University of California, December 2006 (with Henning Bohn, Economics, UC Santa Barbara, and Calvin Moore, Mathematics, UC Berkeley), on line at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/reports/AC.Futures.Report.0107.pdf
• Faculty Diversity in the University of California: 30 Year Trends, UCSB Divisional Committee on Affirmative Action and Diversity, June, 2001
• Cultural Dynamics and Financial Prospects in a Water-Treatment Start-Up Company (consultancy report, November 2000).
• Handbook of Affirmative Action, UCSB Media Group, October 1995

• "Public Universities at Risk: 7 Damaging Myths," The Chronicle, Volume 55, Issue 10, Page A128.
• "The World of Finance in American Studies," review essay, American Quarterly (forthcoming 2008).
• "The Humanities in a Time of Financial Crisis," review essay, American Literary History (forthcoming 2008).
• "Cold Wars and Culture Wars," in Blackwell Companion to American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter (Blackwell, forthcoming 2008).
• "Industrializing the University," in Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, eds., Cloning Cultures (Duke University Press, forthcoming)
• "The Rise of the Guard: The Board of Trustees in the New American University" (with Greg Grandin), in Monika Krause, et al., ed., The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the University Workplace (New York: NYU Press, 2008).
• Review of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, "Nanoscience and Nanosociety" (Center for Nanotechnology in Society blog), http://centernanosociety.blogspot.com/
• "Passé et passif de l’enseignement supérieur américain," Le Monde Diplomatique (September 2007).
• "Where’s My Flying Car?" NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society," on line at http://www.cns.ucsb.edu/filestore/Newfield%20Launch%20Talk.pdf .
• "Nano-Punk for Tomorrow’s People," review of "Tomorrow’s People: the Challenges of Technologies for Life Extension and Enhancement," conference at the James Martin Institute, Said Business School, University of Oxford, March 2006, on line at http://www.martininstitute. ox.ac.uk/NR/rdonlyres/0B4E5B3A-7D58-45A6-A63E-4ABBA77DEDB5/506/OxfordNewfieldRpt0306JMI.pdf ; and http://repositories.cdlib.org/isber/cns/22/ .
• Review of Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), Enterprise and Society 7 (December 2006): 816-818.
• Review of Francesca Sawaya, Modern Women, Modern work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 189-1950 (Penn Press, 2004); and Graham Thompson, The Business of America: The Cultural Production of a Post-War Nation (London: Pluto Press, 2004), American Literature 78 (June 2006): 415 - 418.
• "The Culture of Force," South Atlantic Quarterly (Winter 2006): 241-263. (pdf)
• "75 Years of American Literature," American Literature (June 2005).
• "The Future of the Old Economy: New Deal Motives in New Economy Investors," Histories of the Future, ed. Susan Harding and Daniel Rosenberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Spring 2005).
• Review of David Mowery, et al. Ivory Tower and Industrial Innovation, in Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History 6:2 (June 2005): 348-50.
• "Jurassic U: The State of University-Industry Relations," Social Text 22:2 (Summer 2004): 51-80. (pdf)
• "La France, Version Américaine," Liberation, Paris, France, January 9, 2004.
• "Diversity in the Age of Pseudointegration," Theories of American Literature, ed. Thomas Claviez and Winfried Fluck (Tubingen, Germany: REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19, 2003), 83-112.
• "In Praise of Non-Science," Critical Inquiry (Spring 2003).
• "Democratic Passions: Reconstructing Individual Agency," in Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
• "Few of our seeds ever came up at all": A Dialogue on Hawthorne, Delany, and the Work of Affect in Visionary Utopias," with Melissa Solomon, in No More Separate Spheres, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
• Review of Christopher Lane, The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Intimacy, Victorian Studies 44.2 (Winter 2002): 326-28.
• Review of John A. Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan, American Literature 74.1 (March 2002): 196-98.
• "Middlebrow Reading and the Power of Feeling," review of Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire, American Quarterly 51.4 (December 1999): 908-918.
• "Corporate Culture Wars," Corporate Futures: The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form, ed. George Marcus (University of Chicago Press, 1998): 23-62.
• "The Professor-Manager and the Artist-Bureaucrat," Chicago Humanities Journal 1:1 (1998). Reprinted in Minnesota Review (2000).
• "Whiteness and Meritocracy: An Interview," Disclosure 7 (1998): 85-99.
• "Criticism and Cultural Knowledge," Poetics Today 19:3 (Fall 1998): 423-438. (pdf)
• "Wayward Feelings," review of Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, American Quarterly 50:2 (June 1998): 440-46.
• "Recapturing Academic Business," Social Text 51(Summer 1997): 39-66. (pdf)
• "Corporation H," Bodies INCorporated, CD-Rom catalogue essay for installation on art and corporate culture, San Francisco Art Institute, 1997.
• "Idealism," Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism (Greenwood Press, 1996).
• "Not-Me," Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism (Greenwood Press, 1996).
• "Guillaume Oegger," Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism (Greenwood Press, 1996).
• Sampson Reed," Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism (Greenwood Press, 1996).
• "Introduction," Mapping Multiculturalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) (with Avery Gordon).
• "Multiculturalism's Unfinished Business," Mapping Multiculturalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
• "Corporate Pleasures for a Corporate Planet," Social Text 44 (Fall 1995). (pdf)
• "Going Public," After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s, ed. Newfield and Strickland (Westview Press, 1995) (with Ron Strickland).
• "White Philosophy" (with Avery Gordon), Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 737-757. Reprinted 1) Identities, ed. K Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 2) Cultural and Literary Critiques of the Concepts of "Race," ed. E. Nathaniel Gates (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997): 149-69. (pdf)
• "Democracy and Male Homoeroticism," Yale Journal of Criticism 6:2 (Fall 1993): 29-62.
• "What Was `Political Correctness'?: Race, the Right, and Managerial Democracy in the Humanities" Critical Inquiry 19 (Winter, 1993): 308-36. Revised and reprinted in PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy, ed. Jeffrey Williams (New York: Routledge, 1994): 109-145. (pdf)
• Review of Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Prose Studies 15 (August 1993): 244-47.
• "Controlling the Voice: Emerson's Early Theory of Language," ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 38:1 (Fall 1992): 1-29.
• "Ignore the Pressure: Academic Freedom and Cultural Dissent," Mediations 16.2 (May 1992): 33-36.
• "A Teacher for Democratizing Liberalism: A Response to Teachers for a Democratic Culture," Mediations 16.1 (Fall 1991): 13-15.
• "Emerson's Corporate Individualism," American Literary History 3:4 (Winter 1991): 657-84. (pdf)
• "Loving Bondage: Emerson's Ideal Relationships," American Transcendentalist Quarterly 5:3 New Series (September 1991): 183-93.
• "The Politics of Male Suffering: Masochism and Hegemony in The American Renaissance," differences 1.3 (Winter 1989): 55-87.
• Review of David Van Leer, Emerson's Epistemology, Nineteenth Century Literature 42 (March 1988): 512-15. (pdf)

Current Projects

• Currently working on a book about corporate cultural studies entitled The Empowerment Wars

Recent Course Offerings

• Global California
• US Cultures of Peacetime
• Contemporary Social Theory
• Race and Ethnicity in Cultural Studies