Rob Latham

Post-WWII American & British Literature, Film & Popular Culture

My research focuses on post-WWII American literature and popular culture, especially genre fiction and film, which I approach using interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from sociology, film and media studies, and technoculture studies. As a teacher I bring the interdisciplinary perspectives and multimedia focus of my scholarship to the classroom, generating a pedagogical practice informed by cultural-studies methods. While I have developed regular offerings in postmodern fiction at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and have also taught courses on major American and British authors, many of my classes have followed a more broadly synthetic approach, canvassing not only fictional works but also film, music, and artifacts of material culture. For example, I have twice taught courses on Youth Subculture Studies (a main focus of my first book), which have covered the subject in an exhaustive fashion: students have read works of sociology, cultural theory, music history, and popular journalism. My graduate seminars on Cyborg Culture and Technoculture Studies have been similarly wide-ranging, tackling connections between technology and contemporary culture through an examination of cybernetics theory, science fiction literature and film, performance art practices, and so on. These sorts of courses provide both expansive overviews of their topics and rigorous introductions to interdisciplinary methodology. My classes are geared to show the complexity of the relationship between literary texts and cultural contexts. Above all, what I try to communicate to students is that culture is a site of interpretive struggle, and that grasping the "meaning" of a text involves coming to grips with the ways it has been made to mean by competing critical approaches and diverse communities of readers.

Office: 455 EPB
Phone: 319-335-0465
E-Mail: Rob-Latham@uiowa.edu

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