Benjamin Bateman

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 is the PI on a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant entitled "Fictions of Survival: Pandemic Literatures and Our Present Time." The project includes 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 will be published as a special focus section of Minnesota Review (Duke UP) in 2025. Benjamin is also the PI on a UKRI Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled "Inhospitable Modernisms." The fellowship will commence in October, 2022. 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. Authors to be studied include Andrew Holleran, Dale Peck, Sarah Schulman, John Weir, and Patricia Powell. The book will end with a chapter or two on contemporary novels that reinhabit the period in which effective treatments for HIV/AIDS were not yet available.