Stephen Burn

Biography

Stephen J. Burn joined the School of Critical Studies in 2013, after spending nearly a decade at Northern Michigan University, where he was Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature. He has published widely on contemporary fiction, writing both academic books and articles, and regularly reviewing fiction for the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement. He is currently preparing an edition of David Foster Wallace’s letters, and is writing a monograph about the American novel in the age of neuroscience. He is guest editor for a forthcoming special issue of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to Neuroscience and Modern Fiction, while—with Bryan Cheyette and Peter Boxall—he edits Bloomsbury’s series New Horizons for Contemporary Fiction. Much of Burn’s research concentrates upon the generation of American writers who came of age during (and to some extent came to dispute) postmodernism’s imperial reign. He wrote the first books devoted to David Foster Wallace (David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide [2003, revised edition 2012]) and Jonathan Franzen (Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism [2009]), while he also edited Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers (2008), Conversations with David Foster Wallace (2012), and (with Marshall Boswell) A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (2013). His books and reviews have been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and he wrote the essay that opened the New York Times Book Review’s 2011 feature on “Why Criticism Matters.” He has given keynote lectures at conferences in America, Belgium, and England.

Research Interest

Contemporary American and British Fiction Neuroscience, Consciousness, and the Novel Encyclopedic Novels Postmodernism and its Legacy Experimental Fiction