Benjamin Bateman

Senior Lecturer in Post-1900 British Literature

Biography

Background

Benjamin studied English and political science as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, where he remained for his postgraduate study. After completing his doctorate in 2009, he taught and served as the director of The Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities at California State University, Los Angeles. He joined The University of Edinburgh in 2018 as a lecturer in post-1900 British literature. Benjamin is currently the lead judge for The James Tait Black Prize in Fiction, the coordinator of the How to Read a Novel MOOC, and the Director of Learning and Teaching for The School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures. 

Undergraduate teaching

Benjamin teaches Global LGBT Fiction at  honours level, and he delivers lectures for Introduction to Queer Studies in ECA and Gender and Visual Culture in LLC.

Postgraduate teaching

Benjamin has taught Modernist Aesthetics and Late Modernism and Beyond for the MSc in Literature and Modernity. In Fall 2024, he will be tutoring on the core course of the Comparative Literature MSc. 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Benjamin is currently limited in his capacity to take on new doctoral students, but he is open to looking at proposals significantly engaged with queer theory, queer modernism, and/or HIV/AIDS literature.  

Current PhD students supervised

 

 

 

Research summary

Benjamin's primary research interests lie in modern and contemporary literature, queer theory, and the environmental humanities. His first book, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival--published by Oxford University Press in 2017--examines precarious and collaborative forms of survival in the fiction and autobiographical prose of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, E.M. Forster, and Willa Cather. His newest book, also with Oxford University Press, is entitled Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, and it appeared in March 2023.

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction breaks with appearance-based models of queer performativity and argues for the experiential richness and political potentials of recessive tendencies in 20th and 21st-century queer literary production. The book theorizes a “perish-performative” that allows for agency in practices of abeyance, and it discovers within queerness’s ample archive of vanishing acts an environmental ethos antithetical to inflationary versions of the human. Tying modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran’s gay classic Dancer from the Dance, and then moving to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream and the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold’s Lote, the book refuses the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, delineating instead a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and varied opportunities for imaginative reverie. This precarious subjectivity, necessitated but not defined by oppression and obstacle, rewards and restores the queer self, and it also contests the logics of development, acquisition, and productivity that wreak havoc on the planet and entrench social disparities of race, class, and ability. To our present moment of lockdowns and social distancing, Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction supplies multiple accounts of the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils to be found in pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.

As of June 2022, Benjamin was the PI on a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant entitled "Fictions of Survival: Pandemic Literatures and Our Present Time." The project included an international symposium on the topic of representations of pandemics in literature (1650-Present)--which was held December 8-9 2022 at The University of Edinburgh--and an edited collection in which scholars flesh out the lessons of pandemic literatures for our present time. The collection of essays was published as a special focus section of Minnesota Review (Duke UP) in 2025. In addition to his editorial work, Benjamin contributed an introduction and essay to this special focus section. 

Benjamin was also the PI on a UKRI Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled "Inhospitable Modernisms." The fellowship ran from 2022-2025.    

Current research interests

Benjamin has begun a new book project that revisits HIV/AIDS fiction from the 1980s and 1990s and examines both its (underappreciated) formal complexity and its co-emergence with the field of queer theory. "Early AIDS Fiction and the Literary Forms of Survival" is now under contract with Oxford University Press. Benjamin continues to work in modernist studies and is writing a chapter for The Cambridge Companion to Global Modernism.

Knowledge exchange

  

This article was published on