McKenna 211
J. Brandon Pelcher (Ph.D. in German Literature, Johns Hopkins University 2018) is a Visiting Assistant Professor whose research interests include German and French language literature, art, and culture from the 19th century to the present, as well as their various interactions with media, political, eco-critical, and feminist theories. Projects have included the aesthetics and phenomenology of forgetting; and the eco-epistemology of commodity consumption. Recent research has been particularly interested in questions of ideological subject formation through the semiotic, medial, and material practices of cultural objects and techniques.
His current book project, The Dadaist Subject: Disruptions and Destabilizations in Ideology, investigates the ways in which Dadaist works subvert the formation of stable subjects. Through a theoretical framework of subject formation, paying particular attention to the subject’s encounter with the changing role of newly ubiquitous media at the beginning of the 20th century and in the aftermath of World War I, he examines Dadaist works and their paradoxical, ironic, hypertheatrical uses of materiality, genre, media, and commodity, as exemplary of a incisive Dadaist praxis that subversively, infelicitously performs stable subject formation.
With a commitment to develop his student's critical thought and analysis, he has taught courses on the avant-garde, film and media, contemporary German society, German fairy tales, and regularly teachings on "Dada and Surrealist Literature.”