Arin Keeble

My research focuses on the literary and cultural response to terrorism and crisis. I believe that through analysis of the ways texts represent, resist and/or reinforce the official narratives of “events” or moments of rupture, it is possible to move beyond often limited and reductive understandings of such phenomena. My research seeks to operate within the "world narrative," and by engaging with literature and culture, probes the extents to which we can understand instances of terror and crisis as symptoms of neoliberalism, structural inequality and uneven world-systems. Additionally, I am increasingly interested in the way literature depicts the intersection of traumatic ruptures with long-established patterns of state violence, systemic prejudice and other forms of slow violence.

My first monograph, The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity was published in 2014 and my second monograph, Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context: Literature, Film and Television, was published in 2019 by Palgrave. I am presently working on a new book, under contract with Edinburgh University Press, called Twenty-First Century Fictions of Terrorism, which should appear in 2022. I am also co-editing (with Maria Torres-Quevedo and Sheri-Marie Harrison) a collection of essays on Jesmyn Ward, also under contract with EUP and scheduled for publication in 2023. I have published scholarly articles in Journal of American Studies, Parallax, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Modern Language Review, Comparative American Studies, European Journal of American Culture, Canadian Review of American Studies, Reconstruction and Punk and Post Punk. I am co-editor (with Samuel Thomas) of a cluster of essays on ‘new literary television’ published by Post45Contemporaries, to which I also contributed. Other essays of mine appear in the Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (2019), The City in American Literature and Culture (CUP 2021), and The Routledge Companion to Modern Literature and Music (2021). I also have written book reviews and literary journalism for the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times and The Independent.

I am a member of the British Association of American Studies, the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies and am Vice Chair of Contemporary Studies Network