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Profile for Kimberly Defazio

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Kimberly Defazio Pronounce my name

Associate Professor
English University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

Kimberly Defazio's office hours

Monday
5:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.
or by appointment
Tuesday
By appointment only
Wednesday
9 a.m. to midnight
5:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Thursday
1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
or by appointment
Friday
By appointment only

Remote office hours offered: In the Fall 2025 semester my in-office Student Hours are on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:30-6pm and on Thursdays from 1:30 to 3:30pm. I also have remote office hours on Wednesdays from 9-10am through Zoom. My remote Student Hours are Tuesdays (11-12am) and Thursdays (10:30-11:30) through Zoom: https://wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/j/3366910034?pwd=ZUZXbTVFYXIwTURXZm1JVEs5S2s3UT09

Kimberly Defazio Pronounce my name

Associate Professor

English

Specialty area(s)

Romanticism, 19th Century British Literature, Materialism, Posthumanism, Critical and Cultural Theory, and the City

Current courses at UWL

ENG 110: College Writing

ENG 204: British Literature after 1800: Literary Ecologies

ENG 302: Intermediate Topics in Literature

Education

Ph.D., English, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
M.A., English, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY
B.A., English and Textual Studies, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

Career

Teaching history

ENG 110: College Writing I: World Writing

ENG 200: Literature and Human Experience: The Urban Seen

ENG 204: English Literature II: Literary Ecologies

ENG 301: Foundations for Literary and Cultural Studies

ENG 367: 19th Century English Literature: The Green Humanities: Wordsworth, Dickens and Contemporary Ecocritique

ENG 462: Seminar in British Literature: The Empire of the Body: Body Textual, Body Medical, Body Erotic

ENG 481: Seminar in Literature and Culture: Humanities, Ecology and Capitalism 

ENG 484: Literary Capstone: Literary Vision in a "Post" Literary Age

ENG 494: Special Topic: The Posthumanist Imaginary: Between Human and Nonhuman Worlds

Research and publishing

Books:

Everyone is a Materialist Now (forthcoming) 

Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary (Palgrave 2025)

Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities After Humanism. Co-editor (Lexington Books 2016)

The City of the Senses: Urban Culture and Urban Space (Palgrave 2011)

Recent Translations of My Work into Other Languages:

A translation into Chinese of my first book, The City of the Senses, was published by Normal University Press (Beijing) in 2022.

A German translation of my essay "Naturalism is Not Materialism: Spinoza and New Materialism" was published in M&R: Magazin Für Gegenkulture (Berlin) in December 2021.

Special Issues:

Co-editor of special issue on Materialism and Speech in Nineteenth-Century Prose (2018)

Recent Essays:

"Pandemic Life: Spinoza, Herd Immunity, and the Immanent Joy of the Body Natural" (forthcoming)

"Untimely Materialist Meditations on Affect." Co-author. In Speculative Affect: Objects and Emotions, edited by Charmaine Eddy (Palgrave 2025)

"Introduction" to special issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose. Co-author (2018)

"The Critic as Accountant." Nineteenth-Century Prose 42.2 (Fall 2015)

"Melancholia and Posthumanist Metaphysics" in Stories in Post-Human Cultures, edited by Adam L. Brackin and Natacha Guyot (Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013)

"The Aesthetics of Empire: Affect and the Universality of Consumption." Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics Under the Sign of Globalisation, edited by Mads Anders Baggesgaard & Jakob Ladegaard (Aarhus University Press 2011)

Conference Papers and Invited Talks:

“Rereading Marx Reading Spinoza: Materialism, Matter and the Event.” North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Purdue University, September 2024.

Co-chair of Panel on Speech in the Nineteenth Century at the Institute on Culture and Society Conference at the University of Albany (SUNY), June 2018.

Talk on "The City of the Senses" and new research at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. June 2015.

Talk on "The City of the Senses" at South Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan, China. June 2015.

“Reading With Negri.” Special Session Chair. Modern Language Association Annual Conference. Chicago, IL. January 9, 2014.

“Melancholia and Posthumanist Metaphysics.” Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace, and Science Fiction. Mansfield College, Oxford, UK. 19 July 2013.

“New Materialism and Cultural Critique.” Special Session Chair. Modern Language Association Annual Conference. Boston, MA. January 5, 2013.

“Material Events: de Man, Badiou, and Romantic Disaster.” International Conference on Romanticism. Tempe, AZ. November 9, 2012.

Research Fellowship:

Awarded a Research Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison for the 2019-2020 academic year to develop research for a new book on materialism and the (post)humanities.

 

Kudos

published

Kimberly DeFazio, English and Amrohini Sahay, Scholar in Goa, India, co-authored the chapter "Untimely Materialist Meditations on Affect" in "Speculative Affect: Objects and Emotions," published on March 10 by Palgrave Macmillan. The chapter is a meditation (what Nietzsche would call “untimely”—since it is out of season with thoughts now) on affect. Affect is other ways of knowing: it is a resistance to any “monologic,” an insurrection against logic itself. Comprised of heterogeneous singularities, the essay is not an undoing of affect by calculatory reason, but an unshallowing of affect through materialist meditation and its mediation...materialist not in the matterist sense to which affect is conventionally bound but in the sense of labour and its complex, dialectical relations. A form of “parology” (Lyotard), the essay is at once a breaking of rules and a pathway beyond them.

Submitted on: Mar. 22

published

Kimberly DeFazio, English, authored the book "The City of the Senses, which was recently translated into Chinese" published on Jan. 21 by Beijing Normal University Press. The City of the Senses: Urban Culture and Urban Space (Palgrave 2011) was translated into Chinese by Ou Wuchen and published by Beijing Normal University Press. The translation is included in the first volume of a new book series, "Cultural and Urban Studies Translation Series."

Submitted on: Mar. 27, 2023

published

Kimberly DeFazio and Robert Wilkie, both English, co-authored the article "The Immeasurable Humanities" in La Crosse Tribune published on Feb. 26 by Lee Enterprises. The op-ed, on “evidence-based” teaching as the metaphysics of pedagogy in the managerial university, is published in the Sunday Tribune.

Submitted on: Mar. 15, 2023

published

Kimberly DeFazio and Robert Wilkie, both English, co-authored the article "Negative Capability, the Pedagogy of Metrics and the Managerial Machine" in The La Crosse Tribune published on Aug. 28 by The La Crosse Tribune. “Negative Capability, the Pedagogy of Metrics and the Managerial Machine” is an article on the humanities as the ethical consciousness of a democratic society. The task of the humanities is to cultivate “negative capability,” capability of being in uncertainties, doubts and tolerant of ambiguity and otherness. The humanities of the “negative capability” is being displaced by a managerial anti-intellectualism that has turned the humanities into “assessable” skills.

Submitted on: Sept. 2, 2022

published

Kimberly DeFazio, English, authored the article "Das Mysterium der »Agency«: Der Neue Materialismus liefert die passende Philosophie für eine zunehmend orientierungslose Linke" in M&R: Magazin Für Gegenkulture published on Jan. 1 by Verlag 8. Mai. The essay was translated into German and published in a special issue on the critique of imperialism. “Naturalism is not Materialism: Spinoza, New Materialism and the Left,” the original English title, analyzes dominant theories of materialism in the global North which, by reducing the material to matter and affect, normalize global relations of capitalist exploitation.

Submitted on: May 2, 2022

awarded

Kimberly DeFazio, English, received the award for a UW System Fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year at the Institute for Research in the Humanities on Mar. 7, 2019 in UW-Madison. She will be working on a new book analyzing the “new materialist turn” in the humanities and social sciences and its literary, theoretical and pedagogical implications.

Submitted on: April 25, 2019

published

Kimberly DeFazio and Robert Wilkie co-authored the article "Introduction" in "Nineteenth-Century Prose" published on April 2, 2019 by San Diego State University. They were invited to edit a special issue of the journal devoted to speech and class.

Submitted on: April 3, 2019

published

Kimberly DeFazio and Robert Wilkie co-authored the book Human, All Too (Post)Human published on Sept. 1, 2016 by Lexington Books.

Submitted on: Sept. 16, 2016

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