Brian Glavey

Assistant Professor

Office: 500 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2263
glaveyb@mailbox.sc.edu

Education

Ph.D., University of Virginia, 2007

Specialization Areas

• Twentieth-century American literature
• Modernism and the avant-garde
• Visual studies
• Gender studies and queer theory

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

• ENGL 287: American Literature
• ENGL 429U: Modernism and Visual Culture
  

Current Research Project(s)

I am currently at work on a book manuscript entitled The Sissy Arts: Modernism and Queer Ekphrasis. This project brings together the insights of queer theory, aesthetics, and visual studies to argue for the importance of a literary tradition that turns to the representation of the visual arts as a means of thinking about gender and sexuality. For a series of American poets and novelists including Djuna Barnes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, the relation between word and image has provided a staging ground for investigating the possibilities and limitations of what has come to be known as the politics of visibility. Queer ekphrastic texts identify with works of art to transfigure stigma and reification into new forms of aesthetic value, privileging form not because it offers transcendence or wholeness but because it allows for the revaluation of the experience of being treated as an image. Attending to such works provides an opportunity to rethink many assumptions about the relationship between sexuality and aesthetics that have structured discussions of modernism, the avant-garde, and visual culture.

Publications

“Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots: Queer Ekphrasis and the Statuesque Poet,” American Literature 79.4 (December 2007)