1. Home

Greg Barnhisel

Greg Barnhisel is Professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (Columbia, 2015) and James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (Massachusetts, 2010); editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (Massachusetts, 2010); and co-editor of the scholarly journal Book History. He published in many scholarly journals as well as Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Republic, Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, and other general-interest publications. The recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Houghton Library, the Harry Ransom Center, Princeton University Libraries, and the Eisenhower Foundation, he is a Visiting Fellow in the Yale Department of English for 2021-2. He is currently completing a biography of the Yale professor and spy Norman Holmes Pearson.

Twitter: @gbarnhisel

 

Contributions

Rethinking Faulkner in the “Black Lives Matter” Era

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has done an enormous amount of work to educate Americans and the rest of the world about how deeply embedded white supremacy is in our institutions, including cultural ones like art and literature. It has also demanded that we center the voices and perspectives of nonwhite people. So why is William Faulkner having another moment, right when it feels like we have heard quite enough of white people’s takes on race relations? And why is he still at the top of our pantheon of authors when so many other perfectly suitable successors, such as Toni Morrison, have emerged since Faulkner’s death fifty years ago?

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley

Even taking into consideration penicillin and the atomic bomb, bureaucracy may be the most consequential and pervasive of twentieth-century humanity’s gifts to ourselves. (Global warming we gave to all species.) Yes, administrative gears ground in ancient Rome and classical China, but in the 1900s bureaucratic organizations and institutions of every type spread like kudzu. Sociologists such as William Whyte and Max Weber documented how, over the first half of the century, bureaucracies proliferated beyond the church, the military, and the government, coming to colonize every aspect of modern life.