Eric Aronoff

 

Eric Aronoff received his BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, where he concentrated in German and Hebrew literature. He then became a charter member of Teach for America and spent three years teaching middle school in the South Bronx and Baltimore. He returned to graduate school to earn his PhD in English at Rutgers University. Eric’s research interests include nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, anthropology, and theories of culture, race and nation, literature and the environment, and science fiction. His book, Composing Cultures:  Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2013), traces the debates over the idea of “culture” circulating among artists, literary critics, and anthropologists in the early twentieth century. His current book project examines the intersection of science fiction, anthropology and questions of culture and the human from the 19th through the 21st centuries. His work has appeared in such journals as MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Genre, and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. He won an MSU Teacher-Scholar Award in 2010-11 in recognition of his devotion to and skill in teaching.