About Kevin
I teach English and cultural studies at Pomona College, in Claremont, California, about thirty miles east of downtown Los Angeles; my formal title is W. M. Keck Professor and Chair of the Department of English. I hold a PhD in modern British literature from UCLA, and have my undergraduate English & psychology degree from UC Davis, and a postgraduate diploma in Anglo-Irish literature from Trinity College, Dublin. I’d taught at Loyola Marymount University, Clemson University, Columbia University, and Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, before coming to Pomona in 2008. I’m embarrassingly happy here: as a colleague said recently about his experience at Pomona, I feel like I’ve fallen into a big pot of honey.
I’m a scholar of literary modernism by vocation, and have published widely on twentieth-century and contemporary British and Irish fiction. My first book, The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain, was published in 1996. I’ve also edited three volumes of critical essays on modernism: Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism (1994); Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading (1996; with Stephen Watt); and A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006; with David Bradshaw). I currently serve as General Editor for the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a classroom text, and as series editor, with Mark Wollaeger, of the Oxford University Press book series Modernist Literature & Culture. I’m past-President of the Modernist Studies Association and the Midwest Modern Language Association.
While a literary scholar by training, I’ve become a critic of popular music and popular culture by avocation. In 1999, I edited Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, with Bill Richey. Is Rock Dead? followed, in 2006; most recently, I edited the Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (2009), and oversaw (as “creative editor”) a new textbook on rock history, Think Rock (Prentice Hall, 2010). I also write the popular music column “Pop Life” for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and pieces that have appeared there will be republished on occasion at fakechineserubberplant.com. I have served on the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch (IASPM-US), and as the Editor-in-Chief of the Association’s Journal of Popular Music Studies, through June 2010.
If you’d like to see an actual c.v., you can view that here.
Those are the nuts-and-bolts, but reading it over, it sounds pretty bloodless. I hope you won’t find the blog itself as dull as this bio: writing the blog is some of the best fun I have all week. When it comes to contemporary popular culture, I work hard to keep a balance between amusement and irritation; as Elvis Costello sings, “I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.” (Except that I was never really disgusted.) I’m equally distrustful of the curmudgeons and the uncritical ravers. I’m fascinated by the high wisdom of low forms; I love the fact that a good critic can find really smart things to say about some really stupid shit.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading fakechineserubberplant.com as much as I enjoy writing it. And if you like—or hate!—what you see here, please do register your opinion through the Comments.
help kevin
my Mary is now an old english literature major – at Riverside – and today has declared . that she , hates . james joyce = Hahaha ! true, but thats what she said. I jest don’t know what to do as a parent!
Hows life? Join my on facebook – I’m boring… No one to talk music with except my psychologists…
paddy