Jeff Nunokawa

Professor

5 McCosh Hall

(609) 258-1865

nunokawa@princeton.edu

Office Hours:
On leave AY 22-23

Teaching and Research Interests:
Postcolonialism
Literature and Ethnicity
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Eighteenth-Century Literature


Ph.D., Cornell University, B.A. Yale University. Jeff Nunokawa specializes in English literature from about 1830 till about 1900. His first book, The Afterlife of Property, studies how the novels of Dickens and Eliot labor to preserve the idea of secure possession by overseeing its transfer from the sphere of a cold and uncertain economy to a happier realm of romance. Tame Passions of Wilde: Styles of Manageable of Desire excavates the aspiration to imagine a form of desire as intense as those that compel us, but as light as the daydream or thought experiment safely under our control. He has also written a bunch of articles about this and that aspect of nineteenth century literature. You can ask him about them, if you are interested. His current project is a book whose working title is something like “Eros and Isolation: Getting Away from Others in Nineteenth Century Literature”. This book brings a range of social theory to bear on writers like Austen, C. Bront?, Thackeray, Dickens and Eliot to figure out why it’s so hard to break free, even for a little while, from the groups that surround and define us. Most generally, he is interested in the ways that various ideas of society clash and collaborate with one another. Before his day is done, he hopes to write a book about Henry James.